| Two major models purport to describe the relationship between a bilingual's two languages. The independence model holds that there are separate linguistic memories for each language. The interdependence model holds that there is a single integrated linguistic memory. The main hypothesis of this study is that lexical information is represented in language specific lexicons and word recognition requires searching the appropriate lexicon.; Because no objective Spanish frequency counts comparable to English norms are available, frequency ratings were obtained for 224 English words from English monolinguals and for these words and their Spanish translations from Spanish-English bilinguals in Experiments 1 and 2. These highly reliable ratings were used to select stimulus words for Experiment 3.; The separate lexicons hypothesis predicts that when a bilingual is focused on one language (the target language), word recognition latencies will be determined by the language specific lexicon. Spanish-English bilinguals were tested in a two part lexical decision word recognition experiment. In Part 1, the target language was either English or Spanish. The word stimuli were: (1) Noncognates (words with differently spelled translations, e.g., 'dog' and 'perro'); (2) Cognates (words with identically spelled translations, e.g., 'actual'); and (3) Homographic-noncognates (words that occur in both languages but with different meanings, e.g., 'red'). Noncognates and cognates have similar frequencies of usage in each language, but homographic-noncognates generally differ in frequency. Part 1 latencies were determined by the freqency of the words in the target language. Part 2 was an unanticipated cross-language transfer block. Latencies were again primarily determined by the frequency of the words in the target language. No cross-language facilitation of noncognate translations was found. However, there was equivalent cross-language facilitation of cognates and homographic-noncognates, (i.e., repetitions of the same spelling pattern across languages). This transfer was independent of the target language and frequency of usage in the target languages. The results of this experiment are consistent with the predictions of the separate lexicons hypothesis. |
