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In the one language only condition, the researchers performed the experiment with a high tone indicating Dutch and a low tone indicating no response. For an added twist, Kroll and colleagues included pictures in the experiments whose names were cognates -- words that sound similar in both languages -- to see if the similarity made it easier to choose the second language word. "Bilinguals were faster to name cognates, and the result held for the second language even when they were not forced to have the first language active," says Kroll.

The results of these studies indicate that while a second language may not intrude when a bilingual person is speaking their native language, when speaking a second language, the first language is always active and cannot be suppressed.

"A bilingual learns to attend to a set of cues that allows them to suppress the stream of language, to modulate processing so that the second language is what is spoken, but the first language is still there and active," says Kroll. "We would like to understand how that happens."

According to the Penn State researcher, it was thought that an environment of total immersion in a language would provide massive exposure to a second language and suppress the first language. However, she believes that a large component of language immersion involved learning a new set of cues to the second language. To test this, the researchers took students who had no exposure to German or Dutch and taught them a list of 40 Dutch words. Some students learned the words in association with their English counterparts and others learned the words in association with a picture. Some of the pictures were oriented in the normal way and others were upside down o
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Contact: A'ndrea Elyse Messer
aem1@psu.edu
814-865-9481
Penn State
18-Oct-2003