Bilingual Inconsistency Effect

One of the leading models of discourse processing states that the activation of information within a text occurs through an automatic spread of activation between associated concepts, known as cohort-based retrieval. Moreover, previous studies that have investigated bilingual reading comprehension have found that certain processes that support the construction of quality mental representations of discourse are less efficient in a bilingual's non-dominant language (L2) compared to their dominant language (L1). The current study investigated cohort-based retrieval in the L1 and the L2 using a sample of 44 highly proficient, college-aged Spanish-English bilinguals that read narrative passages all in their L1 or L2 and that did or did not contain inconsistent information. We failed to find any evidence of cohort-based retrieval in the earliest stages of textual processing but did see a trend in a later stage measure of processing such that when the bilingual participants read in their L2, total reading times were slower on the inconsistent versions of the passages compared to the consistent versions. All in all, we share evidence to refute the current description of cohort-based retrieval as an initial stage of processing and to replicate previous findings that bilinguals are less efficient at resolving inconsistent information when processing text in their L2.