Cross-language and cross-modal activation in hearing bimodal bilinguals
Date
2016Author
Villameriel, Saúl
Dias, Patricia
Costello, Brendan
Carreiras, Manuel
Metadata
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Saúl Villameriel, Patricia Dias, Brendan Costello, Manuel Carreiras, Cross-language and cross-modal activation in hearing bimodal bilinguals, Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 87, April 2016, Pages 59-70, ISSN 0749-596X, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.11.005.
Abstract
This study investigates cross-language and cross-modal activation in bimodal bilinguals.
Two groups of hearing bimodal bilinguals, natives (Experiment 1) and late learners
(Experiment 2), for whom spoken Spanish is their dominant language and Spanish Sign
Language (LSE) their non-dominant language, performed a monolingual semantic decision
task with word pairs heard in Spanish. Half of the word pairs had phonologically related
signed translations in LSE. The results showed that bimodal bilinguals were faster at
judging semantically related words when the equivalent signed translations were
phonologically related while they were slower judging semantically unrelated word pairs
when the LSE translations were phonologically related. In contrast, monolingual controls
with no knowledge of LSE did not show any of these effects. The results indicate
cross-language and cross-modal activation of the non-dominant language in hearing
bimodal bilinguals, irrespective of the age of acquisition of the signed language.