Language non-specific lexical activation in bilinguals: Evidence from the phoneme monitoring task

Abstract

The language-specific versus language non-specific views of bilingual lexical activation has been overwhelmingly debated in the contemporary bilingual research. In this context, the present study attempted to address this issue in a group of bilingual subjects. The study employing phoneme monitoring task in two orthographically dissimilar languages (Kannada & English) in a group of normal bilinguals. The subjects required more time to reject phonemes in the non-target language (translation) picture names. The findings of the study supported the language non-specific view of bilingual lexical activation. Further, the study also revealed the role of orthography in phoneme monitoring task especially when two orthographically dissimilar languages are considered.