Do bilinguals avoid ambiguity or minimize processing effort? Insights from an online eye-tracking study in spoken Mandarin

Previous research on anaphoric reference shows that bilinguals tend to choose more explicit referential forms (e.g., overt pronouns over null pronouns) compared to monolingual speakers. It remains unclear whether this tendency towards greater explicitness extends to other forms of referential uncertainty, such as lexical ambiguity, or whether it depends on specific processing demands of anaphoric reference tasks. Avoiding lexical ambiguity may be demanding because it requires speakers to inhibit a readily accessible shared (ambiguous) label and retrieve a less accessible, more specific alternative. By conducting two experiments examining lexical ambiguity in spoken Mandarin, we tested two hypotheses: Hypothesis 1 : bilinguals would rather be redundant than ambiguous in general; Hypothesis 2 : bilinguals are less likely to avoid ambiguity when doing so is too costly. In Experiment 1, L1 Mandarin L2 English speakers in the UK and more-monolingual speakers in China completed a picture naming task. We manipulated whether the preferred label was ambiguous in the visual context (Ambiguous Condition) or unambiguous (Unambiguous Condition) and tested whether speakers avoided ambiguous labels. Experiment 2 extended this task by incorporating online eye-tracking using WebGazer. Our results showed that, contrary to Hypothesis 1 , bilinguals were more likely than more-monolinguals to use ambiguous expressions for ambiguous trials. Eye-tracking analysis revealed that bilinguals tended to direct early attention towards image pairs with more accessible shared labels, indicating a preference for linguistic choices that are cognitively less demanding; by contrast, more-monolinguals showed proactive monitoring of ambiguity depending on their responses. These findings support Hypothesis 2 , suggesting that bilingual referential choices may be shaped by domain-specific processing demands rather than by a general preference for avoiding ambiguity. These findings also shed light on cognitive constraints in bilingual lexical access and early signs of lexical attrition.