Task and context effects in bilingual processing

Abstract

Psycholinguistics tends to talk about general models for language processing and ignore the effects of task and context. Researchers speak about, for instance, models of word recognition, as if performance would not depend on the actual circumstances in which it occurs. Fortunately, there is an increasing interest in the effects of task demands and context types on language processing. This chapter first describes a model for bilingual word recognition that gives only a rudimentary account of context and task effects, the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model. To make clear that this model requires adaptation, reaction time studies are discussed, showing the effects of different types of context on bilingual lexical processing. This leads to the extension of the bilingual word recognition model with a system that explicitly takes into account task and context aspects. The adapted model, the BIA+ model, is shown to be compatible not only with reaction time data, but also with data from electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques