How country of origin and stimuli language influence visual word recognition in bilingual children.

We used mouse tracking to determine how country of origin and stimuli language influence visual word recognition in bilingual children.Children attending bilingual schools in Spain and the USA completed a lexical decision task in English. The task included real English words (e.g., <italic>true</italic>), and pseudohomophones following Spanish (e.g., <italic>tru</italic>) and English (e.g., <italic>troo</italic>) orthographical rules.Bilingual children from both countries performed worse when responding to English pseudohomophones (within-language interference) than Spanish pseudohomophones (between-language interference).The children from the USA outperformed the children from Spain in almost every measure. Interestingly, their mouse trajectories followed a different pattern.When responding to pseudohomophones, children from the USA showed a pronounced initial deviation toward the incorrect response (likely due to a strong activation of the phonology of the real English word) followed by a very effective corrective movement (likely due to an orthographic verification mechanism).Mouse tracking provides novel insights regarding language activation in bilingual readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]