Effects of list composition and task demands on interlingual homograph processing in unbalanced trilinguals

Abstract

Abstract We investigated how list composition (pure vs. mixed) and task demands (lexical decision vs. go/no-go) affect interlingual homograph (IH) processing in Dutch–English–French unbalanced trilinguals. Across six experiments with English (L2) as the target language, participants responded to identical Dutch-English homographs presented in three types of stimulus lists: a pure English (L2) list, a mixed Dutch–English (L1–L2) list, or a mixed English–French L2–L3 list. Linear mixed-effects analyses on response times and error rates revealed inhibition effects for IH, stronger in mixed lists and even stronger in go/no-go tasks. The results support the predictions of the BIA+ and Multilink+ models, highlighting the roles of list composition, language dominance, and task schema in modulating cross-language lexical activation effects. We argue that response mappings play a crucial role in shaping inhibition during multilingual lexical access.