Abstract Visual world studies with bilinguals have demonstrated spontaneous cross-linguistic activations. In two experiments, we examined whether concurrent visual working memory (VWM) load constrains bilingual parallel activation during spoken word comprehension. Hindi-English bilinguals heard a spoken word in Hindi (L1) or English (L2) and saw a display containing the spoken word-referent, a phonological cohort of the spoken word’s translation and two unrelated objects. Participants completed a concurrent WM task of remembering an array of five coloured squares and judging its similarity with a test array. Participants were asked to click on the spoken word-referent in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. Reduced parallel activation and enhanced target activation was observed under the load for L2 spoken words in Experiment 1 (where the task-demands were high). The findings suggest that a VWM load can constrain the spontaneous activation of an irrelevant lexicon, under certain conditions.

中文翻译：

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视觉工作记忆负载限制了任务需求下的语言非选择性激活

摘要 对双语者的视觉世界研究已经证明了自发的跨语言激活。在两个实验中，我们检查了并发视觉工作记忆 (VWM) 负荷是否会限制口语理解过程中的双语平行激活。印地语-英语双语者听到印地语 (L1) 或英语 (L2) 口语单词，并看到包含口语单词参考对象、口语单词翻译的语音队列和两个不相关对象的显示。参与者完成了一项并发的 WM 任务，即记住由五个彩色方块组成的数组并判断其与测试数组的相似性。参与者被要求在实验 1 中点击口语所指的词，但在实验 2 中不点击。在实验 1（任务要求高）的 L2 口语负荷下观察到并行激活减少和目标激活增强。研究结果表明，在某些条件下，VWM 负载可以限制不相关词典的自发激活。