Effects of Bilingual and Monolingual Presentations and Time on Concept- and Language-Matching Tasks

Abstract

Balanced Turkish-English bilingual participants viewed word pairs, presented both monolingually (English-English or Turkish-Turkish) or bilingually (English-Turkish or Turkish-English) and both for short and long durations. They made decisions on whether the simultaneously presented words in a pair were in the same language or not, or whether they denoted the same concept or not. In the short presentation condition, we found no evidence for subliminal processing. In cases in which both words were consciously identified, participants were more accurate, although not faster in the long than in the short presentation condition for both language and concept decisions. In the long presentation condition, language decisions were more accurate than concept decisions, although not faster. In addition, language decisions were not affected by whether the words were synonyms (concept identity), and concept decisions were not affected by whether the presentation was monolingual or bilingual (language identity), although in the monolingual conditions, “same” decisions were faster but not more accurate, and in the bilingual conditions a speed-accuracy trade-off was observed in that “same” decisions were faster but “different” decisions were more accurate.