Effects of list composition and task demands on interlingual homograph processing in unbalanced trilinguals

Abstract

We investigated how list composition (pure vs. mixed) and task demands (lexical decision vs. go/no-go) affect interlingual homograph (IH) processing in Dutch–English–French unbalanced trilinguals. Across six experiments with English (L2) as the target language, participants responded to identical Dutch-English homographs presented in three types of stimulus lists: a pure English (L2) list, a mixed Dutch–English (L1–L2) list, or a mixed English–French L2–L3 list. Linear mixed-effects analyses on response times and error rates revealed inhibition effects for IH, stronger in mixed lists and even stronger in go/no-go tasks. The results support the predictions of the BIA+ and Multilink+ models, highlighting the roles of list composition, language dominance, and task schema in modulating cross-language lexical activation effects. We argue that response mappings play a crucial role in shaping inhibition during multilingual lexical access.