A long-standing question about bilingualism concerns which representations are shared across languages. Recent work has revealed a bilingual Sentence Superiority Effect (SSE) among French–English bilinguals reading mixed-language sentences: identification of target words is more accurate in syntactically grammatical than ungrammatical sentences. While this ability to connect words across the two languages has been attributed to a rapid parsing of shared syntactic representations, outstanding questions remain about the role of semantics. Here, we replicate the SSE in Spanish–English bilinguals (e.g., better identification of vacío in “my vaso is vacío” [my glass is empty] than “is vaso my vacío” [is glass my empty]). Importantly, we report evidence that semantics do contribute to word identification, but significantly less than syntax and only in the context of syntactically grammatical sentences. Moreover, the effect is moderated by language proficiency, further constraining the conditions under which shared cross-linguistic representations are rapidly accessed in the bilingual mind.

关于双语的一个长期存在的问题是，哪些表征是跨语言共享的。最近的研究表明，在阅读混合语言句子的法英双语者中存在双语句子优势效应 (SSE)：目标词的识别在句法语法上比在非语法句子中更准确。虽然这种跨两种语言连接单词的能力归功于共享句法表示的快速解析，但关于语义的作用仍然存在悬而未决的问题。在这里，我们在西班牙语-英语双语者中复制了 SSE（例如，在“my vaso is vacío”[我的玻璃杯是空的]中比“is vaso my vacío”[is glass my empty] 更好地识别 vacío）。重要的是，我们报告了语义确实有助于单词识别的证据，但明显少于语法，并且仅在句法语法句子的上下文中。此外，这种影响受到语言熟练程度的影响，进一步限制了在双语思维中快速访问共享的跨语言表征的条件。