Bilingual Representation of Discourse

Abstract

English-Persian bilingual subjects decided whether probes were true or false for some previously studied discourses written in either English or Persian. The response times to probes depicting explicit events were much faster when the probes were written in the same language as their discourses than when they were written in the other language. However, for probes depicting implicit or false events, the difference between response times to probes written in the same language and response times to probes written in the other language was substantially less. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that the form of the stored representation of the meaning of discourse is the same for both languages of the bilingual person.