Question

DO YOU THINK THAT BILINGUAL HAS AN EFFECT ON LEXICAL DECISION TASKS? WHY OR WHY NOT

Answer 1

• Lexical decision tasks(LDT) are very commonly used in research on language processing. During a lexical decision task, a participant is asked to decide if a stimulus they see on a screen is a word or not. In a standard version of this task, participants will see cognates like “winter” and English control words like “ant”, as well as a set of non-words like “vasui”. In such a task, bilinguals respond more quickly to the cognates than to the control words.The two languages a bilingual knows are stored in a single mental lexicon.
• Balanced bilinguals experience cognitive benefits over non-balanced bilinguals and monolinguals in lexical decision tasks.Past research indicates that bilinguals may possess cognitive abilities, such as better selective attention to the salient portions of a task, that would permit them to perform better in a LDT than monolinguals in the presence of distracters.
• The Bilingual Interactive Activation Model states that when presented with a word, bilinguals activate the orthographic representation of that word in both languages, which may require additional processing time.