Walter J B van Heuven

University of Nottingham | Notts · School of Psychology

Multi-stage accounts of Stroop effects suggest that Stroop effects result from different conflict and facilitation components. Consistent with these accounts, Augustinova et al. (2019) reported evidence for task, semantic and response components in Stroop effects. They also investigated how vocal and manual responses impacted the magnitude of each...

Studies using a relatedness judgement task have found differences between prime-target word pairs that vary in the degree of semantic relatedness. However, the influence of working memory load on semantic processing in this task and the role of the type of working memory task have not yet been investigated. The present study therefore investigated...

Objective language proficiency measures have been found to provide better and more consistent estimates of bilinguals’ language processing than self-rated proficiency (e.g., Tomoschuk et al., 2019; Wen & van Heuven, 2017a). However, objectively measuring language proficiency is often not possible because of a lack of quick and freely available lang...

We present SUBTLEX-CY, a new word frequency database created from a 32-million-word corpus of Welsh television subtitles. An experiment comprising a lexical decision task examined SUBTLEX-CY frequency estimates against words with inconsistent frequencies in a much smaller Welsh corpus that is often used by researchers, the Cronfa Electroneg o'r Gym...

A prominent methodological issue in cognitive research on bilingualism is the lack of consistency in measuring second language (L2) proficiency. To reduce the inconsistency in L2 proficiency measurements, brief and valid vocabulary tests have been developed as an objective measure of proficiency in a variety of languages (e.g., English, French, Spa...

This study presents a Polish semantic priming dataset and semantic similarity ratings for word pairs obtained with native Polish speakers, as well as a range of semantic spaces. The word pairs include strongly related, weakly related, and semantically unrelated word pairs. The rating study (Experiment 1) confirmed that the three conditions differed...

A great majority of people around the world know more than one language. So, how does knowing one language affect the learning and use of additional languages? The question of cross-language influences is the focus of this book. Do bilinguals hear, understand, and produce language and meaning differently because of the languages they speak? How wel...

Translation equivalents are widely used in bilingual research concerning word processing (e.g., Eddington & Tokowicz, 2013; Jouravlev & Jared, 2020) and second-language vocabulary learning (e.g., Bracken et al., 2017; Degani et al., 2014). Although translation norms exist in several languages, to date there are no Malay-English translation norms. T...

This paper evaluates a novel high variability phonetic training paradigm that involves presenting spoken words in adverse conditions. The effectiveness, generalizability, and longevity of this high variability phonetic training in adverse conditions was evaluated using English phoneme contrasts in three experiments with Malaysian multilinguals. Adv...

Stimuli. English minimal pairs used in the experiments. (DOCX)

Data. Participants' percentag of correct identifications for the conditions in each experiment. (XLSX)

We conducted three neighborhood experiments with Dutch–English bilinguals to test effects of L2 proficiency and neighborhood characteristics within and between languages. In the past 20 years, the English (L2) proficiency of this population has considerably increased. To consider the impact of this development on neighborhood effects, we conducted...

Electrophysiological and behavioural evidence suggests that Chinese translations of English words are automatically activated when Chinese-English bilinguals read English words (e.g., Thierry & Wu, 2007; Wu & Thierry, 2010; Zhang, van Heuven, & Conklin, 2011). The present study investigated the impact of translation activation in three behavioural...

Dijkstra, Wahl, Buytenhuijs, van Halem, Al-jibouri, de Korte, and Rekké (2018) present in their keynote article a promising computational model of word recognition and word production in monolinguals and bilinguals, called Multilink. We agree with the authors that the model is a “basis for the development of a more general computational model of wo...

Silent word reading leads to the activation of orthographic (spelling), semantic (meaning), as well as phonological (sound) information. For bilinguals, native language information can also be activated automatically when they read words in their second language. For example, when Chinese-English bilinguals read words in their second language (Engl...

Silent word reading leads to the activation of orthographic (spelling), meaning, as well as phonological (sound) information. For bilinguals, native language information can also be activated automatically when they read words in their second language. For example, when Chinese-English bilinguals read words in their second language (English), the p...

Language comprehension is sensitive to the predictability of the upcoming information. Prediction allows for smooth, expedient and successful communication. While general discourse-based constraints have been investigated in detail, more specific phrase-level prediction has received little attention. We address this gap by exploring the ERPs elicit...

Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress in...

Supporting information. (DOCX)

The masked translation priming paradigm has been widely used in the last 25 years to investigate word processing in bilinguals. Motivated by studies reporting mixed findings, in particular for second language (L2) to first language (L1) translation priming, we conducted, for the first time in the literature, a meta-analysis of 64 masked priming lex...

We present Chinese translation norms for 1,429 English words. Chinese-English bilinguals (N = 28) were asked to provide the first Chinese translation that came to mind for 1,429 English words. The results revealed that 71 % of the English words received more than one correct translation indicating the large amount of translation ambiguity when tran...

The need to control multiple languages is thought to require domain-general executive control in bilinguals such that the executive control and language systems become interdependent. However, there has been no systematic investigation into how and where executive control and language processes overlap in the bilingual brain. If the concurrent recr...

Many studies have reported that first language (L1) translation primes speed responses to second language (L2) targets, whereas L2 translation primes generally do not speed up responses to L1 targets in lexical decision. According to the Sense Model (Finkbeiner, Forster, Nicol & Nakamura, 2004) this asymmetry is due to the proportion of senses acti...

The BIA+ model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002) assumes that the activation of second language codes is temporally delayed relative to fi rst language codes in unbalanced bilinguals. Previous research has found these temporal delays in Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) components when manipulating lexicality (Proverbio, Adorni & Zani, 2009) and frequenc...

Abstract This study used eye-tracking to investigate the allocation of attention to multi-modal stimuli during an incidental learning situation, as well as its impact on subsequent explicit learning. Participants were exposed to foreign language (FL) auditory words on their own, in conjunction with written native language (NL) translations, or with...

Appendix S1: List of Experimental Words.

Prior research has reported incidental vocabulary acquisition with complete beginners in a foreign language (FL), within 8 exposures to auditory and written FL word forms presented with a picture depicting their meaning. However, important questions remain about whether acquisition occurs with fewer exposures to FL words in a multimodal situation a...

The need for executive control (EC) during bilingual language processing is thought to enhance these abilities, conferring a “bilingual advantage” on EC tasks. Recently, the reliability and robustness of the bilingual advantage has been questioned, with many variables reportedly affecting the size and presence of the bilingual advantage. This study...

Bilinguals have been shown to exhibit a performance advantage on executive control tasks, outperforming their monolingual counterparts. Although a wealth of research has investigated this 'bilingual advantage' behaviourally, electrophysiological correlates are lacking. Using EEG with a Stroop task that manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA...

We present word frequencies based on subtitles of British television programmes. We show that the SUBTLEX-UK word frequencies explain more of the variance in the lexical decision times of the British Lexicon Project than the word frequencies based on the British National Corpus and the SUBTLEX-US frequencies. In addition to the word form frequencie...

To study prelexical processes involved in visual word recognition a task is needed that only operates at the level of abstract letter identities. The masked priming same-different task has been purported to do this, as the same pattern of priming is shown for words and nonwords. However, studies using this task have consistently found a processing...

Manipulating task difficulty is a useful way of elucidating the functional recruitment of the brain's executive control network. In a Stroop task, pre-exposing the irrelevant word using varying stimulus onset asynchronies ('negative' SOAs) modulates the amount of behavioural interference and facilitation, suggesting disparate mechanisms of cognitiv...

The coinciding form and meaning similarity of cognates, e.g. 'flamme' (French), 'Flamme' (German), 'vlam' (Dutch), meaning 'flame' in English, facilitates learning of additional languages. The cross-language frequency and similarity distributions of cognates vary according to evolutionary change and language contact. We compare frequency and orthog...

Keys to the phonetic transcriptions used in Dataset S1. Codes from several phonetic alphabets (i.e. IPA, DISC, SAMPA, CELEX, CPA, X-SAMPA, Lexique, and CoLFIS) are aligned with that of DISC++. Textfile S1 contains the abbreviations used in Table S1. (DOCX)

Subjective form and meaning similarity ratings for 1004 cognates and non-cognates. Automatic form and meaning similarity measures are added for comparison. (DOCX)

A collection of 15 separate plain text files that contain the automatically identified cognates corresponding to the third column of Table 2. Measures of orthographic and phonetic similarity as well as frequency information are included. Textfile S1 contains the abbreviations used in the headers of the text files. (ZIP)

Subjective form similarity ratings (both orthographic and phonetic similarity ratings) for 319 cognates and non-cognates. Automatic form and meaning similarity measures are added for comparison. (DOCX)

Meanings of the abbreviations used in Dataset S1 and Table S1. (TXT)

First language acquisition requires relatively little effort compared to foreign language acquisition and happens more naturally through informal learning. Informal exposure can also benefit foreign language learning, although evidence for this has been limited to speech perception and production. An important question is whether informal exposure...

Executive control abilities and lexical access speed in Stroop performance were investigated in English monolinguals and two groups of bilinguals (English-Chinese and Chinese-English) in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Predictions were based on a bilingual cognitive advantage hypothesis, implicating cognitive control ability as the crit...

We agree with many of the principles proposed by Frost but highlight crucial caveats and report research findings that challenge several assertions made in the target article. We discuss the roles that visual processing, development, and bilingualism play in visual word recognition and reading. These are overlooked in all current models, but are fu...

Foreign language (FL) films with subtitles are becoming increasingly popular, and many European countries use subtitling as a cheaper alternative to dubbing. However, the extent to which people process subtitles under different subtitling conditions remains unclear. In this study, participants watched part of a film under standard (FL soundtrack an...

This study investigated effects of cross-language similarity on within- and between-language Stroop interference and facilitation in three groups of trilinguals. Trilinguals were either proficient in three languages that use the same-script (alphabetic in German–English–Dutch trilinguals), two similar scripts and one different script (Chinese and a...

In this study, we investigated automatic translation from English to Chinese and subsequent morphological decomposition of translated Chinese compounds. In two lexical decision tasks, Chinese-English bilinguals responded to English target words that were preceded by masked unrelated primes presented for 59 ms. Unbeknownst to participants, the Chine...

Conflict detection and resolution is crucial in a cognitive task like the Stroop task. Previous studies have identified an early negativity component (Ninc) as a prominent marker of Stroop conflict in event-related potentials (ERPs). However, to what extent this ERP component reflects conflict detection and/or resolution is still unclear. Here, we...

Are speakers sensitive to the frequency with which phrases occur in language? The authors report an eye-tracking study that investigates this by examining the processing of multiword sequences that differ in phrasal frequency by native and proficient nonnative English speakers. Participants read sentences containing 3-word binomial phrases (bride a...

If access to the bilingual lexicon takes place in a language independent way, monolingual repetition and masked form priming accounts should be directly applicable to bilinguals. We tested such an account (Grainger and Jacobs, 1999) and extended it to explain bilingual effects from L2 to L1. Dutch–English bilinguals made a lexical decision on a Dut...

In this paper, we review issues in bilingual language comprehension in the light of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related brain potential (ERP) data. Next, we consider to what extent neuroimaging data are compatible with assumptions and characteristics of available psycholinguistic models of bilingual word processing, in pa...

In Experiment 1 ERPs were recorded while French-English bilinguals read pure language lists of French and English words that differed in terms of the number of orthographic neighbors (many or few) they had in the other language. That is the number of French neighbors for English target words was varied and the number of English neighbors for French...

To conduct experimental investigations into the orthographic processing of Modern Greek, information is needed about the lexical properties known to influence visual word recognition. In this article we introduce GreekLex, a lexical database for Modern Greek, which presents collectively for the first time a series of orthographic measures that can...

The large majority of humankind is more or less fluent in 2 or even more languages. This raises the fundamental question how the language network in the brain is organized such that the correct target language is selected at a particular occasion. Here we present behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging data showing that bilingual proce...

To assess the role of the subsyllabic units onset-nucleus (ON; spark) and rime (spark) in Dutch visual word recognition, we compared lexical decisions to four groups of nonwords in which the existence of ONs and rimes was orthogonally manipulated. Nonwords with existent ONs and/or rimes were rejected more slowly and less accurately. ON and rime nei...

Six experiments apply the masked priming paradigm to investigate how letter position information is computed during printed word perception. Primes formed by a subset of the target's letters facilitated target recognition as long as the relative position of letters was respected across prime and target (e.g., "arict" vs. "acirt" as primes for the t...

This paper comments on a paper by Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells in the same issue that discusses executive control in bilingual language processing. It argues that a good approach to studying the cognitive neuroscience of multilingualism is to start from available computational models that were developed using behavioral data;

This chapter reviews current computational models of bilingual word recognition. It begins with a discussion of the role of computational modeling in advancing psychological theories, highlighting the way in which the choice of modeling paradigm can influence the type of empirical phenomena to which the model is applied. The chapter then introduces...

The detailed comments of our colleagues on our keynote article suggest that they all value the integration of various sorts of empirical data into one formalized model of bilingual word recognition. Taking this position, our peers propose further specifications or adaptations of the proposed BIA+ model with respect to its representations, processes...

The paper opens with an evaluation of the BIA model of bilingual word recognition in the light of recent empirical evidence. After pointing out problems and omissions, a new model, called the BIA+, is proposed. Structurally, this new model extends the old one by adding phonological and semantic lexical representations to the available orthographic...

The current study investigates the effect of phonetic inventory on perception of foreign-accented speech. The perception of native English speech was compared to the perception of foreign-accented English (Dutch-accented English), with selection of stimuli determined on the basis of phonetic inventory. Half of the stimuli contained phonemes that ar...

The detailed comments of our colleagues on our keynote article suggest that they all value the integration of various sorts of empirical data into one formalized model of bilingual word recognition. Taking this position, our peers propose further specifications or adaptations of the proposed BIA+ model with respect to its representations, processes...

Several studies have found effects of orthographically related masked nonword primes on lexical decisions to target words. These effects have been explained by the neighborhood characteristics of the target word (Forster, 1987), but the neighborhood characteristics of the prime in combination with the target are also found to be important (Hinton,...

In two experiments Dutch–English bilinguals were tested with English words varying in their degree of orthographic, phonological, and semantic overlap with Dutch words. Thus, an English word target could be spelled the same as a Dutch word and/or could be a near-homophone of a Dutch word. Whether such form similarity was accompanied with semantic i...

A series of progressive demasking and lexical decision experiments investigated how the recognition of target words exclusively belonging to one language is affected by the existence of orthographic neighbors from the same or the other language of bilingual participants. Increasing the number of orthographic neighbors in Dutch systematically slowed...

The BIA model, a language-nonselective access model for bilingual (BL) word recognition (WR), assumes an integrated lexicon for words of different languages. Simulations with the model are presented that account for effects of lexical competitors from the same and another language on target WR in 2 paradigms. First, the model simulates lexical deci...