USE OF ORTHOGRAPHIC REDUNDANCIES AND WORD IDENTIFICATION SPEED IN BILINGUALS

The present study aimed at evidencing some of the factors linked to wo rd identification speed in bilinguals. The performances of beginning a nd of skilled bilinguals on tasks related to single-word decoding were assessed in both the first and the second language. Results of a firs t experiment showed that whereas both groups of bilinguals demonstrate d use of orthographic redundancies specific to their native language, only the skilled group did so as concerns second-language redundancies . It was seen in a second experiment, however, that the use or nonuse of orthographic structure cannot in itself account for the pattern of lexical decision latencies observed for words in the two languages. Ra ther, this pattern is consistent with the idea that word recognition l atency is largely dependent upon subjects' past experience with and ac tual use of words.