This chapter reports on three experiments using the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm to explore whether interlingual homographs (i.e., words with competing semantic and overlapping orthographic representations) are activated selectively or nonselectively. The literature is somewhat controversial when it comes to the question of how bilinguals process ambiguous language. While the majority of studies suggest language nonselectivity, some research seems to indicate selective bilingual lexical access depending on the user’s linguistic needs and demands. In Experiment 1, which serves as a baseline, Spanish-English bilinguals listened to sentences in which a critical prime (e.g., trial) was associated with the English meaning of a homograph target (cases). In Experiment 2, participants were presented with homograph-translation primes (e.g., the stimulus married is presented before cases). Experiment 3, aside from the homograph-translation priming from Experiment 2, included a Spanish language mode induction variable presented at the beginning of the experiment. Results point to the effects of proficiency and priming in modulating language coactivation.

This chapter provides a critical overview of translation ambiguity, which arises when bilinguals are confronted with a situation in which more than one translation is possible for a given word. We first discuss the sources of translation ambiguity, its prevalence, and the methods for measuring it. We then describe the consequences of translation ambiguity for lexical processing and learning. Finally, we explore how translation ambiguity can be modeled in the bilingual mental lexicon and discuss the possibility that bilingualism is another expression of ambiguity in which the bilingual mind is constantly activating multiple meanings in translation.