Korean-English Bilinguals’ Semantic Processing in Spoken Language Recognition

The present study investigates bilingual semantic processing in spoken language with a specially designed multi-modal phonological decision task. Thirty-eight Korean-English bilinguals were asked to judge the phonological congruency of simultaneously presented visual and spoken word pairs while ignoring semantic information. The results showed that the task performance was interfered by non-selective activation of both languages’ lexicons when the same meaning of visual English word and spoken Korean word were presented. However, when the same word pairs were presented in reversed modality - visual Korean word and spoken English word - such interference effect was not found. It indicates that in contrast to written language, bilingual spoken word recognition of second language does not require lexical activation of native language.