Do you eat 'pasta' for dessert and 'tender' your clothes? A comparison of cross-language activation in Turkish and Spanish learners of English

Abstract

[eng] The present study investigates whether L1 Turkish and L1 Spanish learners of English experience cross-language activation when recognising words that share spelling but differ in meaning across languages, i.e., interlingual homographs (IHs). Two primed lexical decision tasks in English were employed to examine if primes semantically related to the target IH’s L1 meaning – e.g., arena (sand in Spanish) preceded by beach – would entail shorter reaction times. Additionally, this study examines if typological differences between participants’ L1 (Turkish or Spanish) and L2 (English) influence L2 word recognition, a rather understudied relationship. Results from both experiments revealed dual-language activation, as participants recognised interlingual homographs significantly slower than control words. However, no significant differences were found between the Turkish and Spanish group, thus, language typology did not have a significant effect on L2 visual word recognition. Moreover, no cross-language semantic priming effects were found, as IHs were processed slower than control words, which did not hold a semantic relationship with their primes. Importantly, the results from this study support the language-non-selective hypothesis, i.e., the notion that L2 word recognition entails co-activation of languages, even in monolingual settings.