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. 2016 Mar 15;11(3):e0151430.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151430. eCollection 2016.

Interference and Inhibition in Bilingual Language Comprehension: Evidence from Polish-English Interlingual Homographs

Joanna Durlik  1 , Jakub Szewczyk  1 , Marek Muszyński  1 , Zofia Wodniecka  1   2
Affiliations

Interference and Inhibition in Bilingual Language Comprehension: Evidence from Polish-English Interlingual Homographs

Joanna Durlik et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

The main goal of the present study was to explore the involvement of inhibition in resolution of cross-language activation in bilingual comprehension and a possible modulatory effect of L2 proficiency. We used a semantic relatedness judgment task in L2 English that included Polish-English interlingual homographs and English translations of the Polish homographs' meanings. Based on previous studies using the same paradigm, we expected a strong homograph interference and inhibition of the homographs' Polish meanings translations. In addition, we predicted that participants with lower L2 proficiency would experience greater interference and stronger inhibitory effects. The reported results confirm a strong homograph interference effect. In addition, our results indicate that the scope of inhibition generalized from the homograph's irrelevant meaning to a whole semantic category, indicating the flexibility of the inhibitory mechanisms. Contrary to our expectations, L2 proficiency did not modulate the effects of interference and inhibition, possibly due to a relatively low variability in proficiency within our participant sample.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. RTs in Pair 1.
Fig 2
Fig 2. RTs in Pair 2.
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