Bilingual Visual Word Recognition in a Lexical Non-meaningful Context: A Word-Search Puzzle Study

Abstract

Parallel language activation in bilinguals is the currently accepted view of word recognition processing in bilinguals. The mental lexicon is viewed as a network. In bilinguals, these networks can be activated at the same time and, according to the BIA+ model, are connected. Words that have similar orthographic or semantic representations in both languages, such as interlingual homographs and cognates, affect the recognition speed of a bilingual speaker. L2 proficiency can affect the recognition of these words. Most studies on bilingual word recognition use the Lexical Decision Task as a method. Due to the limitations of this method, especially for bilinguals, a new method is used to test which word type, English words, Dutch words, or English-Dutch cognates, participants will recognise most frequently. This method, developed by Dr. Zuckerman, uses a Word-Search Puzzle to study word recognition. This study also investigated the effect of proficiency on the recognition of these words. 50 Dutch-English bilinguals with varying levels of English proficiency were tested, and it was found that both Dutch words and cognates were recognised more frequently than English words. However, English proficiency did not influence the recognition of these words.