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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Basic processes in interference paradigms

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The aim of the present thesis is to investigate the source of Stroop (interference) effects in weak bilinguals (Experiment 1) and in early language learning (Experiment 2-6). Participants performed a bilingual colour-word Stroop task with intermixed first language (L1) and second language (L2) words. The typical finding from the Stroop literature is slower and less accurate responding when the word and colour are incongruent (e.g., “red” in blue) relative to congruent (e.g., “red” in red). Interestingly, this congruency effect occurs for the colour words from both L1 and L2. What produces this congruency effect? That is, what is the source of the conflict produced by incongruent colour words? First, stimulus or semantic conflict is a conflict between the meaning of the word and ink colour. Second, response conflict occurs when different response alternatives are activated. Both types of conflict contribute to L1 congruency effects.According to some theoretical accounts on early language learning, only one of these two types of conflict should emerge for non-fluent L2. Stimulus and response conflict are separated with a 2-to-1 keypress dissociation procedure. Both stimulus and response conflict were evidenced for the weakly spoken L2 (Experiment 1; English in native French speakers). In series of L2 word learning studies, participants were trained with novel Croatian colour words associated with their L1 translations and corresponding semantic representations. Word trainings differed in their structure (types of training trials, number of response alternatives), length (from 32 to 576 trials) and to-be-learned word types (colour words, colour associates) across studies. The L2 word trainings were followed by the Stroop task. Stimulus conflict was observed in response times and response conflict in errors for recently learned L2 words (Experiment 4) when optimal training was administered (in contrast to Experiment 2 and 3, with considerably shorter training). However, this approach did not reveal the source of conflict with colour associates, because no substantial L2 Stroop effect was observed for these stimuli (Experiment 5 and 6). The present findings suggest that low proficient L2 words, when trained in adequate conditions, are potent enough to affect semantic identification and response selection.