A test of interlingual interaction in comprehension by bilinguals

This study tested bilingual subjects' interaction of knowledge of both languages in comprehension. Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals heard 36 sentences, all spoken in English. Twelve were normal English sentences, 12 contained Spanish word order, and 12 contained word-for-word translations of Spanish idioms. The dependent measure was performance on a phoneme-monitoring task; subjects pressed a button when they heard a particular phoneme within each sentence. Immediately following each sentence, subjects wrote down as much of that sentence as they could recall. Results showed that bilingual subjects pressed the button equally quickly for all sentences, but monolinguals were faster for control sentences than for idiom-translations, which was interpreted to mean that a knowledge of Spanish helped the bilinguals in processing the test items semantically.This research was based on a master's thesis presented by the first author and supervised by the second author at Kansas State University. Data were presented at the Psychonomic Society meeting, San Antonio, November 1978.