Bilingual Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

"This chapter provides a critical review of the cross-modal lexical priming (CMLP) paradigm and its variants as used in the bilingual lexical access literature. We first discuss methodological concerns related to task processing demands and the specific requirements (e.g., ecological validity, online vs. offline) required to appropriately assess bilingual exhaustive activation. We then go on to discuss the functionality and reliability of the CMLP and its implementations in bilingual cross-language priming, bilingual figurative language processing (e.g., idioms and metaphors), and word type effects (e.g., homophones, homographs). We underscore the CMLP's capability and flexibility to probe for bilingual multiple lexical activation at multiple points throughout the spoken sentence, and provide early and late measures of language processing. Task selection is crucial in the investigation of bilingual lexical access. Such statement, in the words of Swinney (1982), would seem so self-evident as to be nearly tautologous (p. 152); the question of whether bilingual lexical access is selective (i.e., activation only of contextually relevant language) or nonselective (i.e., simultaneous activation of both languages regardless of contextually-relevant [language] information; Gerard & Scarborough, 1989) would be more appropriately resolved taking into consideration the processing demands imposed by the experimental paradigm (Craik & Lockart, 1972; Morris, Bransford, & Franks, 1977). In addition to the cognitive processes being measured by the orienting task (e.g., semantic vs. shallow), Craik and Lockhart underscore the importance of incidental tasks in which participants are not aware of or told explicitly that they are participating in a memory experiment, for example (see also McLaughlin, 1965)"--