Context Effects in Bilingual Sentence Processing: Task Specifi city

This chapter provides an overview of bilingualism research on visual word recognition in sentence context and relates this work to task-specifi c context factors. Many studies examining bilingual word recognition out-of-context have shown that words from both languages become activated when reading in one language (i.e., language-nonselective lexical access). A recent research line investigated whether presentation of words in a sentence context, providing a language cue and/or semantic constraint to restrict lexical access to words in the target language, modulates this language-nonselective activation. Recent lexical decision , translation , naming , and eye tracking studies suggest that the language of the sentence context cannot restrict lexical access to words of the target language. Eye-tracking studies revealed that semantic constraint of a sentence does not necessarily restrict language-nonselective access, although there is evidence that it has a relatively late effect, and that it affects language-nonselective activation in lexical decision, translation, and naming studies.