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., "coin" [French meaning: corner]) and were paired with a semantic distractor ("bill"), a translation-related distractor ("nook") that was (related to) the French meaning of the homograph, or an unrelated distractor ("dust"). The other half were nonhomographs (e.g., "chin") appearing with a semantic ("jaw"), (bottom-up) orthographic ("chip"), or unrelated distractor ("jar"). Top-down orthographic facilitation was measured as the difference in first keystroke latencies between the translation-related and unrelated condition in homographs and bottom-up orthographic facilitation as the difference between the orthographic and unrelated distractor in nonhomographs. We found no top-down orthographic facilitation in either group, whereas bottom-up orthographic facilitation was generally observed. These findings support the idea of weakened connections in bilinguals and old age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).