Non-selective lexical access in bilinguals is spontaneous and independent of input monitoring: Evidence from eye tracking

Language non-selective lexical access in bilinguals has been established mainly using tasks requiring explicit language processing. Here, we show that bilinguals activate native language translations even when words presented in their second language are incidentally processed in a nonverbal, visual search task. Chinese–English bilinguals searched for strings of circles or squares presented together with three English words (i.e., distracters) within a 4-item grid. In the experimental trials, all four locations were occupied by English words, including a critical word that phonologically overlapped with the Chinese word for circle or square when translated into Chinese. The eye-tracking results show that, in the experimental trials, bilinguals looked more frequently and longer at critical than control words, a pattern that was absent in English monolingual controls. We conclude that incidental word processing activates lexical representations of both languages of bilinguals, even when the task does not require explicit language processing.