MASKED ORTHOGRAPHIC PRIMING IN BILINGUAL WORD RECOGNITION

Two lexical decision experiments tested the influence of briefly prese nted orthographically related primes on target word recognition in bil inguals. The prime stimuli were high-frequency words either from the s ame language as that of the target or from the other language known by the bilingual subjects. When the prime and target were from the same language, orthographically related primes systematically inhibited tar get word recognition, whereas orthographically dissimilar primes did n ot. When the prime and target were words from different languages, the amount of inhibition increased as a function of subjects' level of pr oficiency in the prime word's language, with highly proficient bilingu als showing practically equivalent amounts of within and across langua ge inhibitory priming. These results strongly suggest that a printed s tring of letters can simultaneously activate lexical representations i n both of the bilingual's languages (insofar as these share the same a lphabet), even when subjects are performing a monolingual task.