Poster A43, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Grammatical gender inhibition in learning of a second language vocabulary: ERP evidence
Cheryl Frenck-Mestre1,2,3, Ana Zappa1,3, Jean Mari Pergandi1,4, Daniel Mestre1,2,4;1Aix-Marseille University, 2Centre National de Recherche Scientifque, 3Laboratoire Parole et Langage, 4Centre de Réalité Virtuelle de la Mediterranné
Herein we present electrophysiological evidence of extremely rapid learning of new labels in an L2 for existing concepts and the extension to related concepts, via computerized games, which, however, was constrained by grammatical gender congruence. This adds to ample evidence of the parallel activation of a bilingual’s two languages at the phonological, orthographic and lexical levels. Less examined is the question of how grammatical gender overlap in the L1 and L2 influences either lexical activation in proficient bilinguals or the establishment of a new L2 lexicon. A body of studies has reported gender congruency effects in proficient bilinguals both in speech production tasks (Bordag & Pechmann, 2007; Morales, Paolieri & Bajo, 2011) and in translation tasks (Pechmann et al., 2008;Salamoura & Williams, 2007), although the results of these studies are complex and not always replicated in production (Costa, 2003). We recorded ERPs both prior to exposure with the second language and 4 days later, following a 3 day training session. Results show rapid changes in cortical activity, associated with learning. Prior to exposure, no modulation of the N400 component was found as a function of the correct match vs. mismatch of audio presentation of words and their associated images. Post training, a large N400 effect was found for mismatch trials compared to correctly matched audio-visual trials. In addition, images that were semantically related to learned words (eg. for the learned word “spider” the image of a web was presented), produced a reduction of the N400 compared to mismatched pairs. However, these results only obtained, for learners, for L2 labels that had the same grammatical gender in their L1. For control participants, no effect of gender was observed; i.e. the effect obtained in the L2 learner group was not due to any particularities of the to-be-learned lexicon in the L2. Our results highlight the rapid instantiation of new L2 labels and the influence of grammatical gender on lexical access. They contrast with previous results at the sentential level, showing either lesser (Foucart & Frenck-Mestre, 2010) or no effects (Sabourin & Stowe, 2006) of grammatical gender concord violations when grammatical gender is not the same across their two languages
Themes: Multilingualism, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)