Stimulus intelligibility impacts L1 effects on L2 visual word recognition

For bilinguals, lexical knowledge in the native language (L1) influences word recognition in the second language (L2). When words share both form and meaning across languages, L2 visual word recognition is typically faster, a phenomenon known as the cognate facilitation effect. Such crosslinguistic lexical interaction effects have informed bilingual word recognition models that posit nonselective lexical activation across languages. However, debate remains about the automaticity of this L2-L1 coactivation. The present study examines how the intelligibility of the orthographic input, manipulated through the addition of noise or a difficult font, affects crosslinguistic lexical interactions in Spanish English (L1 L2) bilinguals. The extent to which task difficulty modulates L2-L1 crosslinguistic interactions speaks to different models of bilingual visual word recognition. Experiments 1 shows that stimulus intelligibility attenuates cognate effects. Experiment 2 shows that modulation of cognate effects are partly due to crosslinguistic lexical competitors that is exacerbated by noise. Taken together, Experiments 1 and 2 highlight the importance of simultaneously considering multiple crosslinguistic lexical effects to assess language co-activation. Overall, the findings demonstrate that even under conditions of reduced intelligibility, there is evidence for automatic L2-L1 lexical co-activation.