Meaning first: A case for language-independent access to word meaning in the bilingual brain

Abstract

This study aimed to determine how deeply a word is processed in the bilingual brain before the word’s language membership plays a role in lexical selection. In two ERP experiments, balanced Spanish-English bilinguals read lists of words and pseudowords in Spanish and English, and performed in each language 1) a language-specific lexical decision task, e.g., respond to real words in Spanish, and 2) a language-specific category decision tasks, e.g., respond to Spanish words that refer to a person. In Experiment 1, infrequent words elicited larger negativity between 350–650 msec post-stimulus onset for both target and non-target languages. This indicates that language membership did not block lexical access of non-target words, contrary to previous findings. In Experiment 2, we measured the onset of the target-category P300 as a way of determining if words from the non-target language were temporarily treated as targets. When Spanish was the target language, the ERP waveforms diverged early based on semantic category (people versus non-people), indicating that non-target ‘English people’ words were briefly treated as potential targets. This finding indicates that meaning was accessed prior to using language membership for lexical selection. However, when English was the target language, the waveforms diverged first based on language (Spanish versus English) then semantic category. We argue that the order in which meaning or language membership are accessed may be based on the frequency of use of a bilingual’s languages: the more frequently a language is used (English was more frequently used herein), the faster the words are identified as members of the language, and the greater interference it causes when it is not the target language. In brief, these findings make the case for a moment in processing when language membership matters less than meaning.

The Role of Orthotactics in Language Switching: An ERP Investigation Using Masked Language Priming

“…Whilst all groups showed automatic language identification effects for unconsciously perceived marked Basque words and within the time frames of the N250 (an index of sub-lexical-to-lexical mapping; see Grainger and Holcomb,[39]) and the N400 (an index of lexical to semantic integration), the bilingual group was blind to masked language switching effects for unmarked Basque primes. These results suggest that sub-lexical language cues can speed up language selection mechanisms (see also References [34,[40][41][42]), and that this in turn might affect cross-language lexical activation [23,32,33,[43][44][45].…”

Electrophysiological evidence of sublexical phonological access in character processing by L2 Chinese learners of L1 alphabetic scripts

“…However, there has been little evidence for sublexical orthography-to-phonology mapping during character recognition among beginning Chinese learners. Given the relatively low proficiency in Chinese of the bilingual participants in those studies and previous demonstration of how the pattern of processing in L2 may approach that in L1 when proficiency increases (e.g., Geyer, Holcomb, Midgley, & Grainger, 2011;Ng & Wicha, 2013;Sebastian, Laird, & Kiran, 2011), it is a theoretically significant question whether access to phonological representations of Chinese characters may differ in more advanced L2 Chinese learners, in light of the fundamental differences in orthographic forms of the two writing systems and the nature of orthography-phonology mapping.…”

How do bilinguals identify the language of the words they read?

“…It is well-established that when bilinguals process words, they unconsciously access both of their languages, even when set in a single language context (Dijkstra et al, 2000;Dimitropoulou et al, 2011aDimitropoulou et al, , 2011bDuyck et al, 2007;Duyck and Warlop, 2009;Grossi et al, 2012;Hoshino and Thierry, 2012;Ng and Wicha, 2013;Midgley et al, 2008;Perea et al, 2008;Spalek et al, 2014;Schwartz et al, 2007;Thierry an Wu, 2004;Thierry and Wu, 2007;Van Heuven et al, 1998Zhang et al, 2011). However, bilinguals need to know in which language they are reading to correctly retrieve the meaning of words.…”