Bilinguals have long-lasting experience with cross-language double-mappings (i.e., translation equivalents and interlingual homographs (or false friends)). Considering this, we examined whether bilinguals differ from monolinguals in within-language double-mapping (i.e., synonyms and homographs) processing. Across two experiments, we compared performances from Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-Basque bilinguals on a behavioral picture-word matching task. The words were all presented in Spanish, the native language of all participants. Participants responded to synonyms and homographs (both double-mappings) or single-mappings (controls). The reaction times in both experiments showed clear and significant costs in processing within-language double-mapping stimuli, as well as intrinsic differences in processing homographs versus synonyms. However, these effects did not differ between bilinguals and monolinguals. The present findings thus suggest that the bilinguals’ extensive experience with cross-linguistic double-mappings does not transfer onto within-language double-mapping processing.

Bilingual speakers show cross-lingual activation during reading, especially for words with shared surface form. Cognates (friends) typically lead to facilitation, whereas interlingual homographs (false friends) cause interference or no effect. We examine whether cross-lingual activation in bilingual language models mirrors these patterns. We train Dutch-English causal Transformers under four vocabulary-sharing conditions that manipulate whether (false) friends receive shared or language-specific embeddings. Using psycholinguistic stimuli from bilingual reading studies, we evaluate the models through surprisal and embedding similarity analyses. The models largely maintain language separation, and cross-lingual effects arise primarily when embeddings are shared. In these cases, both friends and false friends show facilitation relative to controls. Regression analyses reveal that these effects are mainly driven by frequency rather than consistency in form-meaning mapping. Only when just friends share embeddings are the qualitative patterns of bilinguals reproduced. Overall, bilingual language models capture some cross-linguistic activation effects. However, their alignment with human processing seems to critically depend on how lexical overlap is encoded, possibly limiting their explanatory adequacy as models of bilingual reading.

The major aim of the survey here reported was to establish whether internationalisms, words which are used internationally, may be used by Slovene and English language users as lexical items with a total meaning overlap. For the purpose of the study, a corpus comprising 895 Slovene lexical items beginning with the letter L and their English-language counterparts was created. The lexical items in the corpus were then compared to verify their similarities in meaning, both on the conceptual, connotational, collocational and stylistic levels, and in form, both in terms of their morphological structure, pronunciation and orthography. The study showed that only a limited number of internationalisms between Slovene and English share enough semantic, morphological, phonetic and orthographic characteristics to be used in the foreign language without falling into the trap of committing interlingual errors. With most of the analysed lexical pairs, differences in meaning, morphological structure, pronunciation and/or spelling could be observed. Often, lexical pairs differed on more than one level. Semantic false friends, for example, may differ in meaning, morphology, pronunciation and spelling. With morphological false friends, the meanings of the lexemes are the same - the lexical pairs would differ in their morphological structure. Often, morphological differences would be accompanied by phonological and orthographical divergences as well. Finally, while with phonological false friends differences in pronunciation may be supported also by different spelling, divergences among orthographical false friends are restricted to orthography. Although it is true that internationalisms are words which are used internationally, it has been proven that they are not used in the same way in the Slovene-English language pair. Yet, it is their apparent similarities that often lead us to believe that they share their meaning and linguistic behaviour, thus inducing us to commit interlingual errors of false-friend type.

... languages is organized and accessed , in particular for understanding the role of the L1 during L2 acquisition ... interlingual homographs or false friends – words that exist in both of the bilingual's languages , but that have ... An Introduction to Applied Linguistics, Second Edition provides a complete, authoritative and up-to-date overview of the state of the field. Each of the 15 chapters offers an extended survey of a central element of Applied Linguistics and is co-authored by two leading international specialists, thus ensuring a full and balanced treatment of the topic covered. The book is divided into three sections: a description of language and language use; essential areas of enquiry; and the four skills and testing. An Introductory chapter familiarises readers with key issues and recurrent themes whilst hands-on activities and further reading sections for each chapter encourage practical analysis and wider reading. For this new edition, each chapter has been fully revised in line with new research and t

The aim of the current study was to explore whether lexical processing in a bilingual’s first language (L1) can be influenced by recent experience in their second language (L2). We focussed on word forms that exist in both their languages, and have either the same meaning (cognates) or a different meaning (interlingual homographs). Previous experiments provided evidence for the reverse form of cross-lingual priming: processing of interlingual homographs in a bilingual’s L2 is delayed by recent experience with these words in their L1, while processing of cognates can be speeded up (Poort & Rodd, 2019b; Poort, Warren, & Rodd, 2016). In the current experiment, Dutch–English bilinguals (N = 106) first encountered cognates (n = 50), interlingual homographs (n = 50) and translation equivalents (n = 50) embedded in English sentences. After a 15 minute delay they made Dutch semantic relatedness judgements to these target words. Significant cross-lingual priming was observed for the interlingual homographs, but not for the cognates. The magnitude of this L2-to-L1 priming effect did not differ from our earlier L1-to-L2 priming effect (Poort & Rodd, 2019b). We also addressed subsidiary questions regarding the (unprimed) processing of cognates and interlingual homographs. Consistent with our previous findings (Poort and Rodd, 2019b), we found a large interlingual homograph inhibition effect in an L1 semantic relatedness task, but no evidence for a cognate facilitation effect in this task. These findings together emphasise the high level of cross-lingual interaction in the bilingual mental lexicon, especially in language-switching contexts.Data, scripts, materials and pre-registration available via https://osf.io/2swyg.

Reaction time (RT) and the N400 ERP component were measured to examine age-related differences in bilingual language processing. Although young bilinguals appear to access both languages simultaneously (i.e., non-selective access), little is known about language selection in older adults. The effect of language context on language selectivity was investigated using interlingual homographs (IH; i.e., words with identical orthography but distinct semantic features in two languages, e.g., coin meaning 'corner' in French and 'money' in English). Younger and older French/English bilinguals were presented with triplets of letter strings comprised of a language context cue, an IH, and a target word, in a lexical decision semantic priming task. RT and ERP results support non-selective language access in young adults; however, the older bilinguals used the language context cue to bias their reading of the IH. Results are discussed in terms of age-related changes in language processing and context use in bilinguals.