English language and linguistics research seminar: Beatrice Lanzini, University of Milano-Bicocca: Practice talk for Psycholinguistics in Flanders 2026

This will be a practice talk for a conference paper entitled Conceptual processing in bicultural bilinguals: effects of cultural congruency in a visual world eye-tracking study, to be given at the upcoming Psycholinguistics in Flanders conference.

Abstract: 

How bicultural bilinguals access conceptual information across languages and cultural contexts remains debated. The Bilingual Dual Coding Theory (Paivio & Desrochers, 1980) predicts that conceptual representations associated with translation equivalents vary depending on the context of acquisition: when languages are acquired in different cultural environments, translation equivalents may evoke distinct representations shaped by different perceptually grounded experiences; when acquired in the same environment, translation pairs should evoke one shared representation.
Testing this hypothesis, we administered a visual world paradigm to two groups of Italian–English bilinguals: Bicultural Bilinguals (residing in the UK) and Monocultural Bilinguals (residing in Italy). Both groups completed two randomised sessions (Italian and English). They viewed a four-picture frame (target, competitor, two distractors) while hearing instructions indicating which picture to click. 32 pairs of prevalidated target images depicted objects with typically Italian or typically British perceptual features. Trials were culturally congruent when the language of the auditory instructions matched the cultural connotation of the target image, and incongruent otherwise. Eye-movement data were recorded online using Labvanced.
Results partially support the hypothesis. Monocultural Bilinguals (n=56) show greater target fixation for typically Italian images in both sessions, though the effect is small and late-emerging, likely attenuated by a salience effect: typically British images attract disproportionate fixations before target onset, suggesting unfamiliarity rather than linguistic processing. Bicultural Bilinguals (n=33) show no consistent congruency effect; instead, their data suggest competition between co-activated representations rather than a binary language-to-representation mapping, consistent with dense L1–L2 interconnections at both lexical and semantic levels.