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The impact of L2 and bilingual experience on predictive processing in EEG
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Poster C25 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Katherine Sendek1, Tamara Swaab1; 1University of California - Davis
Bilingualism has become increasingly common throughout the world. However, its effects on cognition and language processing are still not well understood, compared to monolinguals. Additionally, those areas that have been well studied in bilinguals often show mixed results. One such area is language prediction. It is well established that monolinguals will predict upcoming words in highly constraining contexts, thereby facilitating language processing. Effects of facilitation due to prediction can be found on the N400 (Brothers et al., 2019; Kutas & Hillyard, 1980). Additionally, individual differences in the slope of aperiodic EEG oscillations in a broad band of frequencies have also been correlated with prediction during language processing (Dave et al., 2018; Bornkessel-Scheslewsky et al., 2022). Typically, the EEG of neurotypical individuals has more power for slower oscillations (e.g., delta) relative to fast oscillations (e.g., gamma), and this proportion can be estimated from the 1/frequency (1/f) slope of the power spectrum. Individuals who have a steeper 1/f slope also show greater N400 effects of prediction during language processing (Dave at al., 2018). In contrast, studies investigating predictive processing in bilingual L2 have shown mixed N400 results (Martin et al., 2013; Kaan et al., 2016), and aperiodic activity has not been examined in these studies. It currently is unknown if these mixed N400 findings in studies of predictive processing in bilinguals are due to differences in L2 or the participants’ status as bilinguals, as the majority of the studies have only compared monolinguals to bilinguals in their L2. The present study aims to investigate this question. To do so, we will test English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals (English L2), and English-Chinese (English L1) bilinguals using sentences in English. Stimuli will consist of 40 sentences each in high and low cloze conditions (adapted from Brother et al., 2019). The same target words will be used in both conditions, but the context sentences will be different. During reading, EEG will be recorded. Analysis will include multiple regression to predict the size of the N400 effect and aperiodic slope across conditions and across groups. If differences in the N400 effect are significantly different for the English L2 group as compared to the others, then the results will be interpreted to reflect a specific difference in predictive processing in L2. In contrast, if the monolinguals show significant differences in prediction outcomes as compared to both bilingual groups, this will be interpreted as a general difference in predictive processing in bilinguals. Any differences in aperiodic slope would be novel and may indicate differences in reliance on top-down processing or model updating (Bornkessel-Scheslewsky et al., 2022).
Topic Areas: Morphology, Meaning: Lexical Semantics