Activation of both of a bilingual’s languages during auditory word recognition has been widely documented. Here, we argue that if parallel activation in bilinguals is the result of a bottom-up process where phonetic features that overlap across two languages activate both linguistic systems, then the robustness of such parallel activation is in fact surprising. This is because phonemes across two different languages are rarely perfectly matched to each other in phonetic features. For instance, across Spanish and English, a “voiced” stop is realized in phonetically-distinct ways, and therefore, words that begin with voiced stops in English do not in fact fully overlap in phonetic features with words in Spanish. In two eye-tracking experiments using a visual world paradigm, we examined the effect of a phonemic match (English /b/ matched to Spanish /b/) vs. a phonetic match (English /b/ matched to Spanish /p/) on cross-linguistic co-activation (English words co-activating Spanish) in Spanish L1 and in Spanish L2 speakers. We found that while phonemic matching induced co-activation in both Spanish L1 and Spanish L2 speakers, phonetic matching did not. Together, these results indicate that co-activation of two languages in bilinguals may proceed through activation of categorical phonemic information rather than through activation of phonetic features.

广泛地记录了在听觉单词识别过程中两种双语的激活。在这里，我们认为如果双语中的并行激活是自下而上过程的结果，其中跨两种语言重叠的语音特征会激活两种语言系统，那么这种并行激活的鲁棒性实际上令人惊讶。这是因为两种不同语言的音素在语音功能上很少能完美匹配。例如，在西班牙语和英语中，以语音上不同的方式实现了“语音”停止，因此，英语中以语音停止开头的单词实际上在语音特征上并未与西班牙语单词完全重叠。在两个使用视觉世界范例的眼球追踪实验中，我们研究了语音匹配（英语/ b /匹配西班牙语/ b /）与语音匹配（英语/ b /匹配西班牙语/ p /）对跨语言共激活（英语单词co-activated）的影响西班牙语）（西班牙语）和西班牙语（英语）。我们发现，虽然语音匹配在西班牙语L1和西班牙语L2说话者中都诱导了共同激活，但语音匹配却没有。总之，这些结果表明，双语中两种语言的共同激活可能通过分类语音信息的激活而不是通过语音特征的激活来进行。我们发现，虽然语音匹配在西班牙语L1和西班牙语L2说话者中都诱导了共同激活，但语音匹配却没有。总之，这些结果表明，双语中两种语言的共同激活可能通过分类语音信息的激活而不是通过语音特征的激活来进行。我们发现，虽然语音匹配在西班牙语L1和西班牙语L2说话者中都诱导了共同激活，但语音匹配却没有。总之，这些结果表明，双语中两种语言的共同激活可能通过分类语音信息的激活而不是通过语音特征的激活来进行。