Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 5-1-1999

Journal / Book Title

Psychological Science

Abstract

Previous evidence indicates that bilinguals are slowed when an unexpected language switch occurs when they are reading aloud. This anticipation effect was investigated using a picture-word translation task to compare English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals functioning in “monolingual mode.” Monolinguals and half of the bilinguals drew pictures or wrote English words for a picture or English word stimuli; the remaining bilinguals drew pictures or wrote Spanish words for a picture or Spanish word stimuli. Production onset latency was longer in cross-modality translation than within-modality copying, and the increments were equivalent between groups across stimulus and production modalities. Assessed within participants, bilinguals were slower than monolinguals under intermixed but not under blocked trial conditions. Results indicate that the bilingual anticipation effect is not specific to language-mixing tasks. More generally, stimulus-processing uncertainty prevents the establishment of a “base” symbolic-system procedure (concerning recognition, production, and intervening translation) and the inhibition of others. When this uncertainty is removed, bilinguals exhibit functional equivalence to monolinguals.

DOI

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.00142

Published Citation

Amrhein, Paul C. "On the functional equivalence of monolinguals and bilinguals in “monolingual mode”: The bilingual anticipation effect in picture-word processing." Psychological Science 10, no. 3 (1999): 230-236.

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