Lexical Access in Spanish-English Bilinguals: Manual Stroop Effect

Abstract

The Stroop task is a popular paradigm to investigate bilingual cognitive control. The present study, with Spanish-English bilinguals, investigates the degree of automaticity in bilingual language processing and observes the role that proficiency plays in it. With L1 and L2, there is an interference effect in Control and Incongruent condition, and participants always respond faster in a Control condition. Moreover, participants’ performance of using L1 is not better than L2, which is due to the high level of proficiency of participants in L2. Whether the experience of language influence responses, it cannot be concluded through experiments alone. Therefore, language experience cannot affect responses.