The role of semantics and phonology in bilingual picture naming: Evidence from the phono-translation effect.

To what extent do bilinguals activate information associated with the language that they are not currently using? To address this, we conducted three large-scale picture-word interference experiments involving highly proficient Chinese-English bilinguals in English-only (Experiment 1, one-language context) and mixed English-Chinese (Experiment 2, two-language context) settings and a control experiment involving monolingual English speakers (Experiment 3). In all experiments, participants named pictures in English while ignoring English auditory distractors that were phonologically related to the Chinese translations of the picture names (phono-translation distractors). Chinese-English bilinguals in both the one-language and two-language contexts were quicker to name pictures when just preceded by phono-translation than unrelated distractors, but no such facilitation was observed for monolingual English participants. In all experiments, participants showed inhibition for semantically related distractors and facilitation for phonologically related distractors. Taken together, our findings suggest that words from the nontarget language can be activated even when that language is irrelevant to the task, but the activated nontarget candidates do not compete for lexical selection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).