Visual Word Recognition in Bilinguals: Phonological Priming From the Second to the First Language Ilse Van Wijnendaele University of Leuven Marc Brysbaert Ghent University In this study, the authors show that cross-lingual phonological priming is possible not only from the 1st language (L1) to the 2nd language (L2), but also from L2 to L1. In addition, both priming effects were found to have the same magnitude and to not be related to differences in word naming latencies between L1 and L2. The findings are further evidence against language-selective access models of bilingual word processing and are more in line with strong phonological models of visual word recognition than with the traditional dual-route models. Until 1990, the general idea was that bilinguals had two mental lexicons: one for the first language and one for the second. In addition, a language switch mechanism controlled which lexicon was active. Such an architecture of language selective access seemed ideal to explain why, in general, bilinguals do not expe- rience interference problems from one language to the other. In recent years, however, evidence has accumulated showing that the first stages of visual word recognition are largely language inde- pendent and that the assumption of independent lexicons may be incorrect. Subsequently, we give a summary of this evidence (for further discussion, see Brysbaert, 1998; Brysbaert, Van Dyck, & Van de Poel, 1999; Dijkstra, Timmermans, & Schriefers, 2000; van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998). First, in lexical decision tasks, it has been shown that bilingual participants cannot suppress one of their languages, even when the task strongly urges them to do so because of interference costs. For instance, it has been shown repeatedly that if the nonword trials contain words of the nontarget language, there are large processing costs associated with these trials (e.g., Nas, 1983). In addition, these trials have strong inhibitory effects on the processing of interlingual homographs (i.e., words that exist in both languages but have different meanings; De Groot, Delmaar, & Lupker, 2000; Dijkstra, Grainger, & van Heuven, 1999; Dijkstra, Van Jaarsveld, & Ten Brinke, 1998). The magnitude of the inhibitory effect depends on the relative frequency of the homograph in the target and the nontarget language. Recently, Dijkstra et al. (2000) re- ported that the frequency-dependent interference effect not only appears in a lexical decision task (e.g., for a Dutch–English bilin- gual, Is this a Dutch word or not?), but also in a go/no-go paradigm (e.g., Press on the key when the stimulus is a Dutch word only), despite that in the latter paradigm, there is little discussion that performance would be best if the nontarget language system were simply suppressed. Second, researchers have extended basic findings of monolin- gual language processing to bilingual processing. Bijeljac-Babic, Biardeau, and Grainger (1997), for instance, looked at the inhibi- tion effect of orthographic neighbors. Previous research (e.g., Segui & Grainger, 1990) had shown that low-frequency target words are more difficult to recognize if, immediately before, a high-frequency orthographic neighbor has been presented tachis- toscopically than if an orthographically dissimilar control word has been presented (i.e., recognition of the word BLUR is hampered when it is preceded by the masked prime blue). Such an effect was predicted on the basis of the interactive activation model (McClel- land & Rumelhart, 1981), which sees word identification as the result of competition between orthographically similar words. Bijeljac-Babic et al. (1997) showed that the inhibition effect is present not only for intralingual neighbors, but also for cross- lingual neighbors. Thus, highly proficient French–English bilin- guals experienced more problems processing the French word AMONT when it was preceded by the masked English prime among than when it was preceded by the control word drive. No effect was found for monolinguals and beginning bilinguals, as expected, because the inhibition effect depends on word frequency. Brysbaert et al. (1999) started from the claim recently made that recognition of visually presented words involves automatic, pre- lexical phonological coding (e.g., Frost, 1998; Perfetti & Bell, 1991; Van Orden, 1987). They reasoned that if letters must be converted to sounds before printed words can be recognized, and if the conversion cannot be strategically controlled, then the coding should occur for all grapheme–phoneme correspondences mas- tered by an individual. To examine this issue, Brysbaert et al. used the masked homophonic priming effect first described by Hum- phreys, Evett, and Taylor (1982) for word primes, and later ex- tended by Perfetti and Bell (1991) to nonword primes. Humphreys Ilse Van Wijnendaele, Department of Experimental Psychology, Uni- versity of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; Marc Brysbaert, Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. This research was made possible by Inter University Attraction Poles Grant P4/19 from the Department of Science Policy of the Belgian Federal Government. We thank Wido La Heij, Guy Van Orden, and Laurie Feld- man for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ilse Van Wijnendaele, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium. E-mail: Ilse. vanwijnendaele@psy.kuleuven.ac.be Journal of Experimental Psychology: Copyright 2002 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. Human Perception and Performance 2002, Vol. 28, No. 3, 616 – 627 0096-1523/02/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0096-1523.28.3.616 616