Lexical selection in bilinguals: Do words in the bilingual's two lexicons compete for selection?

In a series of picture-word interference experiments, Catalan-Spanish bilinguals named pictures in Catalan with distracter words printed either in Catalan (same-language pairs) or in Spanish (different-language pairs). Naming was facilitated when the distracter was the name of the picture in both same[e.g., taula-taula (table in Catalan)] and different-language pairs [e.g., taula-mesa (table in Spanish)]. We also found that the facilitation effect was larger for same-language pairs and that semantically related distracters in the same- vs different-language conditions were similarly interfering. These results are interpreted within a lexical model that assumes that only words of the target language are considered for lexical selection and can, therefore, compete for selection. Converging evidence from several experiments indicates that the facilitation asymmetry for same name distracters arises because same-language distracters can activate target phonemes via nonlexical, grapheme phoneme conversion processes. Facilitation was obtained with phonologically related distracters for both same- and different-language conditions but not for their translations. The results suggest that nonlexical phonological processes contribute to the phonological facilitation effect, (C) 1999 Academic Press.