Can bilingual readers process language membership of multiple words in parallel?

Abstract:
We examined if bilingual readers can extract language membership information from multiple words at once. Dutch-English bilinguals completed a lexical decision task in a flankers paradigm, with viewing times manipulated either to constrain (50 ms) or permit (170 ms) serial attention shifts. The findings revealed reliable congruency effects (i.e., worse performance on the central target word when the flankers were presented in a different language than when they were presented in the same language) in 170 ms, but this effect disappeared when the stimulus was presented for 50 ms. The pattern indicates limited parallel extraction of language membership information across multiple words.