Search Results (2)

Second-language (L2) written processing has often been linked to cognitive disfluency, resembling fluency disruptions caused by perceptual challenges, such as visual degradation. This study used Virtual Reality to investigate whether cognitive disfluency in L2 mirrors perceptual disfluency by simulating adverse weather conditions (sunny vs. rainy) and applying visual masking. Spanish–English bilinguals completed a language decision task, identifying orthotactically unmarked words as either Spanish (L1) or English (L2) while experiencing these perceptual manipulations. Results showed that visual masking significantly increased reaction times, particularly for L1 words, suggesting that masking can diminish the native language advantage. Spanish words under masking elicited slower responses than unmasked ones, whereas L2 word recognition remained comparatively stable. Additionally, rainy weather conditions consistently slowed responses across both languages, indicating a general effect of environmental disfluency. A significant interaction between language and masking emerged, highlighting distinct cognitive effects for different disfluency types. These findings suggest that cognitive disfluency in L2 does not equate to perceptual disfluency; each affects processing differently. The use of Virtual Reality enabled the controlled manipulation of realistic environmental variables, offering valuable insights into how perceptual and linguistic challenges jointly influence bilingual language processing. Full article

It is commonly accepted that bilinguals access lexical representations from their two languages during language comprehension, even when they operate in a single language context. Language detection mechanisms are, thus, hypothesized to operate after the stage of lexical access during visual word recognition. However, recent studies showed reduced cross-language activation when sub-lexical properties of words are specific to one of the bilingual’s two languages, hinting at the fact that language selection may start before the stage of lexical access. Here, we tested highly fluent Spanish–Basque and Spanish–English bilinguals in a masked language priming paradigm in which first language (L1) target words are primed by unconsciously perceived L1 or second language (L2) words. Critically, L2 primes were either orthotactically legal or illegal in L1. Results showed automatic language detection effects only for orthotactically marked L2 primes and within the timeframe of the N250, an index of sub-lexical-to-lexical integration. Marked L2 primes also affected the processing of L1 targets at the stage of conceptual processing, but only in bilinguals whose languages are transparent. We conclude that automatic and unconscious language detection mechanisms can operate at sub-lexical levels of processing. In the absence of sub-lexical language cues, unconsciously perceived primes in the irrelevant language might not automatically trigger post-lexical language identification, thereby resulting in the lack of observable language switching effects. Full article