The influence of native-language phonology on lexical access: exemplar-Based versus abstract lexical entries

Psychol Sci. 2001 Nov;12(6):445-9. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00383.

Abstract

This study used medium-term auditory repetition priming to investigate word-recognition processes. Highly fluent Catalan-Spanish bilinguals whose first language was either Catalan or Spanish were tested in a lexical decision task involving Catalan words and nonwords. Spanish-dominant individuals, but not Catalan-dominant individuals, exhibited repetition priming for minimal pairs differing in only one feature that is nondistinctive in Spanish (e.g.,[see text]), thereby indicating that they processed these words as homophones. This finding provides direct evidence both that word recognition uses a language-specific phonological representation and that lexical entries are stored in the mental lexicon as abstract forms.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Humans
  • Multilingualism*
  • Paired-Associate Learning*
  • Phonetics*
  • Psychoacoustics
  • Reaction Time
  • Retention, Psychology*
  • Spain
  • Speech Perception*
  • Students / psychology