Implicit Translation during Second Language Lexical Processing

Most previous studies in psycholinguistics investigating whether bilingual lexical access is non-selective have employed experimental tasks which require the bilingual participant to explicitly activate their two languages or routinely switch between the two. The present study examines bilingual lexical processing through a semantic association task which includes stimuli in only one language and therefore avoids creating an artificial bilingual context. The bilingual participants were unconscious of a hidden character repetition when the English words are translated into their native language, Korean. Results showed significant interference effects of the hidden character repetition in the behavioral data reflected as both longer response times and higher error rates. These findings support and extend the findings of previous studies showing significant ERP modulations due to implicit activation of the first language and suggest that bilingual lexical processing is nonselective: bilingual speakers unconsciously and automatically activate their native language when reading words in their second language.