The Impact of Phonological Co-Activation on Written Language Switching

Language switching has mostly been investigated when switching while speaking and not while writing. As a result, written language switching and the factors that may impact it are not well-understood. In a previous study (Roembke et al., under review), we showed that written language switching is highly facilitated for translation-equivalent word pairs that are identical orthographically (i.e., homographs: TIGER/TIGER [English/German]), even though they mismatched in phonology. Thus, switching facilitation might be the result of limited phonological co-activation when writing homographs, since phonology constitutes the only difference between the translations. In this experiment (planned N = 48; data collection ongoing), we investigate this hypothesis more directly by manipulating the extent to which a word’s phonology had to be activated during written picture naming. German-English bilinguals switch between naming pictures of homographs and quasi-homographs in their dominant versus secondary language. Participants respond by typing the word, and simultaneously speaking the same word in the corresponding language (type-and-speak), tapping their tongue (type-and-tongue-tap) or doing neither (type-only). We predict that speaking while typing impairs switching performance for homographs as compared to type-only or type-and-tongue-tap since language-specific phonology is most strongly activated in the type-and-speak condition. If confirmed, this would suggest that switching facilitation when typing homographs might be due to the scarce recruiting of phonological representations when typing without speaking. unknown other