Recognition of cognates and interlingual homographs: The neglected role ofphonology

In two experiments Dutch-English bilinguals were tested with English wards varying in their degree of orthographic, phonological, and semantic overlap with Dutch words. Thus, an English word target could be spelled the same a s a Dutch word and/or could be a near-homophone of a Dutch word. Whether su ch form similarity was accompanied with semantic identity (translation equi valence) was also varied. In a progressive demasking task and a visual lexi cal decision task very similar results were obtained. Both tasks showed fac ilitatory effects of cross-linguistic orthagraphic and semantic similarity on response latencies to target words, but inhibitory effects of phonologic al overlap. A third control experiment involving English lexical decision w ith monolinguals indicated that these results were not due to specific char acteristics of the stimulus material. The results are interpreted within an interactive activation model for monolingual and bilingual word recognitio n (the Bilingual Interactive Activation model) expanded with a phonological and a semantic component. (C) 1999 Academic Press.