New insights into bilingual visual word recognition: State of the art on the role of orthographic markedness, its theoretical implications, and future research directions

In the past decade, research on bilingual visual word recognition has given rise to a new line of study focusing on a sublexical orthographic variable referred to as orthographic markedness, derived from the comparison of the two orthotactic distributions known by a bilingual reader. Orthographic markers have been shown to speed up language decisions but also, to some extent, to modulate language nonselectivity during lexical access (i.e., the degree of co-activation of lexical representations of the two languages). In this review, we (1) describe the results available in the literature about orthographic markedness on language membership detection and lexical access and discuss the locus of these effects, which leads us to (2) present theoretical extensions to the bilingual interactive activation models and discuss their respective adequacy to the data, finally leading us to (3) propose future research directions in the study of orthographic markedness, such as extension to different reading tasks and contexts as well as considering developmental and learning dynamics.

Automated summary

In the past ten years, research on bilingual visual word recognition has led to a new line of study focusing on a sublexical orthographic variable called orthographic markedness. This variable is derived from comparing the two orthotactic distributions known by bilingual readers. Orthographic markers have been shown to speed up language decisions and also modulate the nonselectivity of language during lexical access. This review summarizes the available literature on orthographic markedness and its effects on language membership detection and lexical access. The review also discusses theoretical extensions to bilingual interactive activation models and proposes future research directions.