Bilinguals activate words from both languages when listening to spoken sentences: Evidence from an ERP-study

Bilinguals activate words from both languages when listening to spoken sentences: Evidence from an ERP-study Nicole Altvater-Mackensen (naltvat@gwdg.de) Free-Floater Research Group “Language Acquisition“, Georg-August-Universitat, Gosslerstrasse 14 37073 Gottingen, Germany Nivedita Mani (nmani@gwdg.de) Free-Floater Research Group “Language Acquisition“, Georg-August-Universitat, Gosslerstrasse 14 37073 Gottingen, Germany Abstract The current study examines whether bilingual word recognition in spoken sentences is influenced by cross-lingual phonological similarity. ERPs were measured while German- English bilinguals listened to German sentences. Target words in the sentences were either German-English homophones (e.g., eagle – Igel ‘hedgehog’), German words that were phonologically closely related to English words (e.g., kitten – Kittel ‘smock’), or German words that had no phonological relation to English words (e.g., Ziegel ‘brick’). ERPs to target words showed an N400-like facilitation effect for words with cross-lingual phonological overlap (homophones and German-English related words) compared to words with no cross-lingual overlap. However, these results were restricted to bilinguals who learned both languages before age 6, but not for those bilinguals who learned English after age 6. This suggests that early bilinguals activate words from both languages when processing spoken sentences in their dominant language-context. Keywords: Lexical access; Word recognition; Bilingualism; N400. Introduction A crucial question in bilingual research is whether lexical access in bilinguals is language-selective, i.e. whether recognition of words in one language of a bilingual involves activation of words from the bilingual’s other language. In the last years, a growing body of studies suggests that this is, indeed, the case. These studies provide evidence for models of bilingual word recognition which assume that lexical access is not always constrained by language context (e.g., the BIA+model; Dijkstra, Grainger & Van Heuven, 1999; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). Yet most of these studies investigated word recognition of isolated, visually presented words (for some recent studies see Wu & Thierry, 2010; Martin, Dering, Thomas & Thierry, 2009; Kerkhofs, Dijkstra, Chwilla & De Bruijn, 2006; De Bruijn, Dijkstra, Chwilla & Schriefers, 2001). Thus, the question arises in how far the results can be generalized to spoken word recognition and to word recognition in sentence context – the modality and context in which most communication occurs. Indeed, for monolinguals, there is evidence that lexical access in auditory and visual word recognition involves autonomous systems (e.g., Taft, 1986; Kouider & Dupoux, 2001) and that word recognition in single-word context dramatically differs from word recognition in sentence context (e.g. Van Petten, 1995). Spivey and Marian (1999) report one of the few studies investigating spoken word recognition in bilinguals. They investigated whether Russian-English bilinguals’ word recognition in Russian is influenced by knowledge of English words. The participants saw familiar objects on the screen and were instructed to perform an action on one of the items. Crucially, the labels for the target image and distracter image overlapped phonologically across languages. For example, participants saw a stamp (marku in Russian) and a marker (flomaster in Russian) and received the Russian instruction Ploji marku nije krestika (‘Put the stamp below the cross’). Tracking the eye-movements of their participants, Spivey and Marian showed that Russian- English bilinguals considered the marker as a target before finally picking up the stamp. This suggests that participants briefly activated the English object-labels even though the experiment only involved Russian and it was therefore neither necessary nor required to activate English words. This result provides evidence that lexical access in bilinguals is not language selective in auditory word recognition. However, in this study, the L2 competitor (e.g., marker) was visually adjacent to the target. This is not the case in our everyday communication and might influence participants’ responding in a manner not typical to standard lexical access. In addition, the sentences in Spivey and Marian’s study were highly restricted (e.g., ‘Put the stamp below the cross’), whilst listeners are typically faced with the task of recognizing words in more variable sentence contexts. A study investigating visual word recognition in sentence context was conducted by Duyck, van Assche, Drieghe and Hartsuiker (2007). They presented Dutch-English bilinguals with orthographically presented English sentences that contained a cross-language cognate like cat (Dutch kat). A first experiment presented the cognate as the final word in the sentence and measured subjects’ response times to judge the lexicality of the sentence-final word. A follow-up experiment presented the cognate in sentence-medial position and monitored subjects’ eye-movements while reading the sentences. The results indicate that subjects show lower lexical decision times for Dutch-English