Disentangling the Role of Deviant Letter Position on Cognate Word Processing

The way of coding letter position has been extensively assessed during the recognition of native words, leading to the development of a new generation of models that assume more flexible letter position coding schemes compared to classical computational models such as the interactive activation (IA) model. However, determining whether similar letter position encoding mechanisms occur during the bilingual word recognition has been largely less explored despite its implications for the leading model of bilingual word recognition (multilink) as it assumes the input-coding scheme of the IA model. In this study, we aimed to examine this issue through the manipulation of the position of the deviant letter of cognate words (external and internal letters). Two experiments were conducted with Catalan–Spanish bilinguals (a masked priming lexical decision task and a two-alternative forced-choice task) and their respective monolingual controls. The results revealed a differential processing for the first letter in comparison to the other letters as well as modulations as a function of language cue, suggesting amendments to the input-coding scheme of the multilink model.