Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Phonological priming from the second to the first language

In this study, the authors show that cross-lingual phonological priming is possible not only from the 1st language (L1) to the 2nd language (L2), but also from L2 to L1. In addition, both priming effects were found to have the same magnitude and to not be related to differences in word naming latencies between L1 and L2. The findings are further evidence against language-selective access models of bilingual word processing and are more in line with strong phonological models of visual word recognition than with the traditional dual-route models

The effects of age-of-acquisition and frequency-of-occurrence in visual word recognition: Further evidence from the Dutch language

It has been claimed that the frequency eOEect in visual word naming is an artefact of age-of-acquisition: Words are named faster not because they are encountered more often in texts, but because they have been acquired earlier. In a series of experiments using immediate naming, lexical decision, and masked priming, we found that frequency had a clear eOEect in lexical tasks when age-of-acquisition is controlled for. At the same time, age-ofacquisition was a significant variable in all tasks, whereas imageability had no effect. These results corroborate findings previously reported in English and Dutch

On the temporal delay assumption and the impact of non-linguistic context effects

It is not easy to comment on Dijkstra and Van Heuven's model because there are many more aspects we agree with than aspects we feel uncomfortable about. Indeed, the BIA model has played an enormous role in showing us how bilingual visual word recognition can be achieved without recurrence to the intuitively appealing – but wrong – ideas of separate, language-specific lexicons and language-selective access. As in many other research areas, a working computational model has been much more influential in convincing critical readers (and researchers) than any series of empirical findings. The BIA+ model inherits this strength and, hopefully, in the coming years will be implemented in enough detail to exceed its predecessor. In the rest of this comment, we would like to put a cautionary note behind the temporal delay assumption introduced in the target article and provide some additional corroborating evidence for the lack of non-linguistic effects on early processes in the identification system

Age-of-acquisition effects in semantic processing tasks

In two experiments, we examined whether word age-of-acquisition (AoA) is a reliable predictor of processing times in semantic tasks. In the first task, participants were asked to say the first associate that came to mind when they saw a stimulus word; the second task involved a semantic categorisation between words with a definable meaning and first names. In both tasks, there were significantly faster responses to earlier-acquired than to later-acquired words. On the basis of these results, we argue that age-of-acquisition effects do not originate solely from the speech output system, but from the semantic system as well. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B,V. All rights reserved.status: publishe