The transmission of semantic, lexical, and orthographic information in young and older bilinguals' typed word production

Older adults may have weakened connections between words and their sounds/spelling, which affects top-down, but not bottom-up language processes (Burke et al., 1991). Similarly, bilinguals may show weaker connections in the same system because the frequency of input for each language is lower than in monolinguals (Gollan et al., 2008). We studied whether younger and older French-English bilinguals experienced top-down and bottom-up orthographic facilitation during the typed naming of English pictures while ignoring a visual distractor word. Half of the targets were interlingual homographs (e.g., "fort" ["loud" in French]) and were paired with a semantic distractor ("castle"), a top-down orthographic distractor ("loud") that was semantically related to the French homograph, or an unrelated distractor. The other half were non-homographs (e.g., "flag") appearing with a semantic ("stake"), (bottom-up) orthographic ("flame"), or unrelated distractor. We found no top-down orthographic facilitation in either group, whereas only the older adults showed bottom-up orthographic facilitation. These findings support the idea of weakened connections in bilinguals and old age.