Looking Without Knowing: Evidence for Language-Mediated Eye Movements to Masked Words in Hindi-English Bilinguals

Looking Without Knowing: Evidence for Language-Mediated Eye Movements to Masked Words in Hindi-English Bilinguals

Blog Article

Cross-linguistic activation has been frequently demonstrated in bilinguals through eye movements using the visual world paradigm.In this study, we explored if such activations could operate below thresholds of awareness, at least in the visual modality.Participants listened to a spoken word in Hindi or English and viewed a display containing masked printed words.One of the printed words was a phonological cohort of the translation equivalent of the spoken word (TE cohort).Previous studies using this paradigm with clearly product visible words on a similar sample have demonstrated robust activation of TE cohorts.

We tracked eye movements to a blank screen where the masked written words had appeared accompanied by spoken words.Analyses of fixation proportions and dwell times revealed that participants looked more often and for longer duration at quadrants that contained the TE cohorts compared to distractors.This is one of the few studies to show that cross-linguistic activation occurs even with masked visual information.We discuss the implications for here bilingual parallel activation and unconscious processing of habitual visual information.