Can bilingual readers process language membership of multiple words in parallel?

Abstract

We examined whether bilingual readers can extract language membership information from multiple words at once. Dutch–English bilinguals completed a lexical decision task in a flankers paradigm, with viewing times manipulated either to constrain (50 ms) or allow (170 ms) sequential reading. The findings revealed reliable congruency effects (i.e., slower on the central target word when the flankers were presented in a different language than when they were presented in the same language) in 170 ms, but this effect disappeared when the stimulus was presented for 50 ms. The pattern indicates limited parallel extraction of language membership information across multiple words.

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/MX2NU). The stimuli, trial-level data for both experiments, and the analysis code are provided in this repository link. The study was not preregistered.