Intralingual and interlingual effects in a pure language list

In various English lexical decision tasks (LDTs), bi-/multilinguals have evinced shorter response times (RTs) for cognates (i.e., words with the same meaning in two languages, e.g., the Dutch-English water) and longer RTs for interlingual homographs (IHs; words with distinct meanings in two languages, e.g., the Dutch-English map) compared to monolingual controls (e.g., Biloushchenko, 2017Biloushchenko, I. B. (2017). How trilinguals process cognates and interlingual homographs: The effects of activation, decision, and cognitive control [Doctoral dissertation, University of Antwerp]. University of Antwerp. [URL]). This suggests that multilinguals automatically activate lexical representations from multiple languages (Dijkstra et al., 1998Dijkstra, T., Van Heuven, W. J. B., & Grainger, J. (1998). Simulating cross-language competition with the bilingual interactive activation model. Psychologica Belgica, 38(3–4), 177–196. ). To further investigate language (non-)selectivity, in our English LDTs, we compare the processing of cognates and IHs to intralingual words that are similar but only exist in English (i.e., cognates to metonyms like chicken, which can refer to the animal and the closely-related sense “chicken meat”, and IHs to homonyms like bat, which has two meanings: “baseball bat” and “nocturnal flying animal”). Half of our cognates and IHs only exist in our native Dutch participants’ non-native languages (English-French) to avoid any potentially confounding effects of the supposed “special status” (Midgley et al., 2011Midgley, K. J., Holcomb, P. J., & Grainger, J. (2011). Effects of cognate status on word comprehension in second language learners: An ERP investigation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(7), 1634–1647. ) of L1. Significant inhibition was found for homonyms and significant facilitation for metonyms and native (Dutch-English) cognates but not for non-native (English-French) cognates. These results are discussed in relation to the language non-selective hypothesis (Dijkstra et al., 1998Dijkstra, T., Van Heuven, W. J. B., & Grainger, J. (1998). Simulating cross-language competition with the bilingual interactive activation model. Psychologica Belgica, 38(3–4), 177–196. ).