Free flowing thought in bilinguals and monolinguals: How language experience and lexical properties influence word associations
- 1Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, United States of America
- 2Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, United States of America
Abstract
Language shapes the organization of semantic memory and influences how individuals retrieve and combine concepts. The present study examined how language experience relates to associative thinking using Forward Flow, a metric that captures how far a thought sequence diverges semantically from an initial concept. Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals completed a free association task in each of their respective languages. Greater vocabulary and language dominance predicted higher Forward Flow, indicating more semantically distant thought sequences. Among bilinguals, Forward Flow was higher in the dominant language than in the non-dominant language, suggesting that the conceptual associations bilinguals make depend on the language of retrieval. The associations participants generated were also influenced by idiosyncratic features of the languages they spoke, such as compounding, semantic ambiguity, and phonology. Our findings suggest that individual language experience and language-specific properties are linked to associative thinking, highlighting the role of language in the conceptual associations people make.
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BibTeX
@article{fernandezduque2026free,
title = {{Free flowing thought in bilinguals and monolinguals: How language experience and lexical properties influence word associations}},
author = {Matias Fernandez-Duque and Viorica Marian},
journal = {PLOS One},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0359889},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359889},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Free flowing thought in bilinguals and monolinguals: How language experience and lexical properties influence word associations
AU - Matias Fernandez-Duque
AU - Viorica Marian
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/05
JO - PLOS One
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0359889
UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359889
AB - Language shapes the organization of semantic memory and influences how individuals retrieve and combine concepts. The present study examined how language experience relates to associative thinking using Forward Flow, a metric that captures how far a thought sequence diverges semantically from an initial concept. Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals completed a free association task in each of their respective languages. Greater vocabulary and language dominance predicted higher Forward Flow, indicating more semantically distant thought sequences. Among bilinguals, Forward Flow was higher in the dominant language than in the non-dominant language, suggesting that the conceptual associations bilinguals make depend on the language of retrieval. The associations participants generated were also influenced by idiosyncratic features of the languages they spoke, such as compounding, semantic ambiguity, and phonology. Our findings suggest that individual language experience and language-specific properties are linked to associative thinking, highlighting the role of language in the conceptual associations people make.
SN - 1932-6203
ER -