The Bilingual Moses Illusion: Evidence for Semantic Illusions in Spanish-Catalan Bilingual Speakers

Abstract

The tendency to overlook semantic inaccuracies in questions like ‘How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?’, also known as the Moses illusion, was introduced into research almost forty years ago. However, the cross-linguistic validation of this effect has been limited, and studies regarding bilingual speakers are still sparse and controversial, even though some theoretical accounts predict that processing in a second language may modulate the rates of semantic illusions by either boosting or hindering the detection of inaccuracies. The present investigation specifically addressed these two concerns, firstly by examining whether the Moses illusion takes place in Spanish native speakers, and subsequently by exploring how it is elicited in the languages of early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilingual speakers. Implemented in the form of a sentential judgement task for semantically correct and incorrect sentences adding the Self-Paced reading technique, the experiments’ results revealed that the Moses illusion happened in Spanish (Experiment 1), and with no statistical differences across Spanish and Catalan (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that semantic illusions take place similarly in both languages of Spanish-Catalan bilingual speakers. Further research is required to consolidate these findings and to build a more solid conceptual framework for the bilingual Moses illusion and second language processing.