Abstract: When bilinguals speak one of their languages, they actively inhibit the other language. The strongest inhibition is believed to be observed for a native language (L1) when bilinguals speak their non-native language (L2) (e.g., Misra, 2012). How strong is this inhibition? Is L1 completely de-activated during L2 processing? Or do bilinguals still process L1 implicitly when communicating in their L2? To answer this question, Dr. Jouravlev examined patterns of eye-movements of Russian-English bilinguals reading English sentences. Participants were not aware that English sentences that they read had some Russian words embedded into them. The Russian words were replaced by the English target words as soon as participant’s eyes crossed an invisible boundary located before the target words. Thus, participants previewed the Russian words in parafovea implicitly, but processed the English words explicitly when fixating on them. The Russian preview words overlapped with English target words in orthography or phonology. The results of this study showed a clear and strong benefit of the parafoveal preview of Russian (L1) words during processing of English (L2) target words.
This study demonstrates that bilinguals integrate orthographic and phonological information across eye-fixations in reading, even when this information comes from different languages. Thus, bilinguals do NOT inhibit their L1 sufficiently during L2 reading to prevent implicit processing of L1. You can access the publication here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1080/17470218.2016.1226906