The Influence of Native-Language Phonology on Lexical Access: Exemplar-Based versus Abstract Lexical Entries

This study used medium-term auditory repetition priming to investigate word-recognition processes. Highly fluent Catalan-Spanish bilinguals whose first language was either Catalan or Spanish were tested in a lexical decision task involving Catalan words and nonwords. Spanish-dominant individuals, but not Catalan-dominant individuals, exhibited repetition priming for minimal pairs differing in only one feature that is nondistinctive in Spanish (e.g., /neə/ vs. /nµtə/), thereby indicating that they processed these words as homophones. This finding provides direct evidence both that word recognition uses a language-specific phonological representation and that lexical entries are stored in the mental lexicon as abstract forms.