Abstract
Behavioral studies with proficient late bilinguals have revealed the existence of orthographic neighborhood density (ND) effects across languages when participants read either in their first (L1) or second (L2) language. Words with many cross-language (CL) neighbors have been found to elicit more negative event-related potentials (ERPs) than words with few CL neighbors (Midgley et al., 2008); the effect started earlier, and was larger, for L2 words. Here, 14 late and 14 early English-Welsh bilinguals performed a semantic categorization task on English and Welsh words presented in separate blocks. The pattern of CL activation was different for the two groups of bilinguals. In late bilinguals, words with high CLND elicited more negative ERP amplitudes than words with low CLND starting around 175 ms after word onset and lasting until 500 ms. This effect interacted with language in the 300–500 ms time window. A more complex pattern of early effects was revealed in early bilinguals and there were no effects in the N400 window. These results suggest that CL activation of orthographic neighbors is highly sensitive to the bilinguals’ learning experience of the two languages.
Highlights
IntroductionResearch over the last 20 years has shown that, within a language, the number of neighbors (i.e., words created by changing a single letter of a target word – Coltheart et al, 1977) of a target stimulus influences the processing of the target
Research over the last 20 years has shown that, within a language, the number of neighbors of a target stimulus influences the processing of the target
Late bilinguals learned Welsh later in life, whereas early bilinguals were exposed to both English and Welsh either at birth or during early childhood. Both behavioral and electrophysiological data revealed differences between the two languages in late bilinguals: they were less accurate and slower in detecting Welsh targets compared to English targets in the categorization task; Welsh words elicited more negative event-related potentials (ERPs) than English words starting at around 300 ms, suggesting that L2 words required more processing resources than L1 words
Summary
Research over the last 20 years has shown that, within a language, the number of neighbors (i.e., words created by changing a single letter of a target word – Coltheart et al, 1977) of a target stimulus influences the processing of the target This effect, named the neighborhood density (ND) effect, is modulated by several factors. Whereas words with a high number of neighbors are generally recognized faster than words with a low number of neighbors in lexical decision tasks, an inhibitory effect has generally been found with non-words (e.g., Coltheart et al, 1977; Andrews, 1989; Holcomb et al, 2002). Carreiras et al (1997) found that ND effects were inhibitory in a progressive demasking task (where participants had to identify the stimuli), null in a lexical decision task, and facilitatory in a naming task
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