Cross-language phonological activation: Evidence from masked onset priming and ERPs

• Russian–English bilinguals named L1 target words preceded by L2 primes.
• Primes and targets had onsets overlapping in phonology and/or orthography.
• Phonological overlap led to modulation of RT and ERP data.
• Orthographic overlap led to modulation of ERP, but not RT data.
• Cross-language representations are shared at the sub-lexical level.

The goal of the present research was to provide direct evidence for the cross-language interaction of phonologies at the sub-lexical level by using the masked onset priming paradigm. More specifically, we investigated whether there is a cross-language masked onset priming effect (MOPE) with L2 (English) primes and L1 (Russian) targets and whether it is modulated by the orthographic similarity of primes and targets. Primes and targets had onsets that overlapped either only phonologically, only orthographically, both phonologically and orthographically, or did not have any overlap. Phonological overlap, but not orthographic overlap, between primes and targets led to faster naming latencies. In contrast, the ERP data provided evidence for effects of both phonological and orthographic overlap. Finally, the time-course of phonological and orthographic processing for our bilinguals mirrored the time-course previously reported for monolinguals in the ERP data. These results provide evidence for shared representations at the sub-lexical level for a bilingual’s two languages.