Abstract We investigated whether bilingual older adults experience within- and cross-language competition during spoken word recognition similarly to younger adults matched on age of second language (L2) acquisition, objective and subjective L2 proficiency, and current L2 exposure. In a visual world eye-tracking paradigm, older and younger adults, who were French-dominant or English-dominant English-French bilinguals, listened to English words, and looked at pictures including the target (field), a within-language competitor (feet) or cross-language (French) competitor (fille, “girl”), and unrelated filler pictures while their eye movements were monitored. Older adults showed evidence of greater within-language competition as a function of increased target and competitor phonological overlap. There was some evidence of age-related differences in cross-language competition, however, it was quite small overall and varied as a function of target language proficiency. These results suggest that greater within- and possibly cross-language lexical competition during spoken word recognition may underlie some of the communication difficulties encountered by healthy bilingual older adults.

中文翻译：

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双语老年人口语处理

摘要 我们调查了双语老年人在口语单词识别过程中是否与在第二语言 (L2) 习得年龄、客观和主观 L2 熟练程度以及当前 L2 接触情况相匹配的年轻人中经历了内语和跨语言竞争。在视觉世界眼动追踪范式中，以法语为主或以英语为主的英法双语者的老年人和年轻人听英语单词，并查看包括目标（领域）在内的图片，语言内的竞争对手（脚）或跨语言（法语）竞争对手（fille，“女孩”），以及不相关的填充图片，同时监测他们的眼球运动。老年人表现出更大的语言内竞争的证据，这是目标和竞争者语音重叠增加的函数。有一些证据表明跨语言竞争中存在与年龄相关的差异，但是，总体上差异很小，并且随着目标语言能力的不同而变化。这些结果表明，在口语识别过程中，更大的内部和可能的跨语言词汇竞争可能是健康的双语老年人遇到的一些沟通困难的基础。