Integrated Phonological Processing in Bilinguals: Evidence from Spoken Word Recognition

The role of cross-linguistic phonological overlap in native and non-native word recognition was examined using an auditory lexical decision task. The degree of phonological overlap across languages was manipulated. Cross-linguistic overlap facilitated word recognition in the non-native language, but inhibited word recognition in the native language. The observed facilitation and inhibition effects provide evidence for a parallel account of bilingual word recognition and suggest an asymmetry in native and non-native phonological processing