Predicting words across languages depends on language context: Evidence from visual world eye-tracking

There is good evidence that monolingual comprehenders can predict the form of upcoming words, and also that bilinguals often activate words from both languages in parallel during bottom-up language comprehension. But it is unclear whether bilinguals predict the form of upcoming words in the language that they are not hearing, and whether such predictions depend on whether or not they have recently encountered that language. We investigated these questions in two visual-world eye-tracking experiments by asking whether Mandarin Chinese (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals pre-activate Mandarin phonological representations of predictable words during English comprehension. Participants heard English sentences containing a highly predictable word while viewing a display. They fixated more on a competitor object whose Mandarin name was a homophone of the Mandarin translation of the predictable word than an unrelated object when both languages were used (Experiment 2) but not when just English was used (Experiment 1). Our findings suggest that bilinguals predict across languages when both languages are contextually relevant but not otherwise.