Cross talk between native and second languages: Partial activation of an irrelevant lexicon

Bilingualism provides a unique opportunity for exploring hypotheses about h ow the human brain encodes language. For example, the "input switch" theory states that bilinguals can deactivate one language module while using the other. A new measure of spoken language comprehension, headband-mounted eye tracking, allows a firm test of this theory. When given spoken instructions to pick lip an object, in a monolingual session, late bilinguals looked br iefly at a distractor object whose name in the irrelevant language was init ially phonetically similar to the spoken word more often than they looked a t a control distracter object This result indicates some overlap between th e two languages in bilinguals, and provides support for parallel, interacti ve accounts of spoken word recognition in general.