Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society Time course of inhibitory processes in bilingual language processing Marı ´a Cruz Martı ´n, Pedro Macizo* and Teresa Bajo University of Granada, Spain This study examines the time course of inhibitory processes in Spanish–English bilinguals, using the procedure described in Macizo, Bajo, and Martı ´n. Bilingual participants were required to decide whether pairs of English words were related. Critical word pairs contained a word that shared the same orthography across languages but differed in meaning (interlingual homographs such as pie, meaning foot in Spanish). In Expts 1 and 2, participants were slower to respond to homographs presented along with words related to the Spanish meaning of the homograph as compared to control words. This result agrees with the view that bilinguals non- selectively activate their two languages irrespective of the language they are using. In addition, bilinguals also slowed their responses when the English translation of the Spanish homograph meaning was presented 500 ms after responding to homographs (Expt 1). This result suggests that bilinguals inhibited the irrelevant homograph meaning. However, the inhibitory effect was not observed in Expt 2 when the between-trial interval was fixed to 750 ms which suggests that inhibition decayed over time. Many studies have shown that when fluent bilinguals comprehend words in their second language (L2), their first language (L1) representations are activated in parallel (see Dijkstra, 2005, for a review). This parallel activation assumption is referred to as the non-selective view of bilingual language processing, and it raises the question of how bilinguals access their lexical representations and of how they manage to control the activation of their two languages. Research on bilingual language processing has used homographs to show parallel activation of the two languages (Beauvillain & Grainger, 1987; De Groot, Delmaar, & Lupker, 2000). Interlingual homographs are words with the same written form but different meaning in the two languages of the bilingual. For example, a word such as ‘pie’ means cake in English, but it means foot in Spanish. If the two languages are activated during the processing of a given word by the bilinguals, all the homograph meanings will be activated regardless of the specific language context in which the * Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Pedro Macizo, Departamento de Psicologı ´a Experimental y Fisiologı ´a del Comportamiento, Facultad de Psicologı ´a, Universidad de Granada, Campus de Cartuja, s/n. 18071 Granada, Spain (e-mail: pmacizo@ugr.es). The British Psychological Society 679 British Journal of Psychology (2010), 101, 679–693 q 2010 The British Psychological Society www.bpsjournals.co.uk DOI:10.1348/000712609X480571