Lexical Activation in Bilinguals' Speech Production: Language-Specific or Language-Independent?

An adaptation of the phoneme monitoring task for speech production was used to determine whether the language that bilinguals are not using is nonetheless activated. Three experiments were conducted in which highly fluent Catalan-Spanish bilinguals had to decide whether a certain phoneme was in the Catalan name of a picture. Phonemes could be either part of the Catalan word, part of its Spanish translation, or absent from both nouns. Results showed that participants took longer to reject the phoneme appearing in the Spanish word than the control one. A fourth control experiment involving monolinguals indicated that these results were not due to specific characteristics of the material. The same pattern was replicated at different SOAs (−2000, +200, +400), which leads us to conclude that both the target language and the language not in use are simultaneously activated.