Abstract
Event-related potentials were recorded during the visual presentation of words in the three languages of French-English-Spanish trilinguals. Participants monitored a mixed list of unrelated non-cognate words in the three languages while performing a semantic categorization task. Words in L1 generated earlier N400 peak amplitudes than both L2 and L3 words, which peaked together. On the other hand, L2 and L3 words did differ significantly in terms of N400 amplitude, with L3 words generating greater mean amplitudes compared with L2 words. We interpret the effects of peak N400 latency as reflecting the special status of the L1 relative to later acquired languages, rather than proficiency in that language per se. On the other hand, the mean amplitude difference between L2 and L3 is thought to reflect different levels of fluency in these two languages.
Highlights
The human ability to understand and speak more than one language has become a topic of central importance in contemporary cognitive psychology, perhaps in part due to the acknowledgment that in today’s world, multilingualism is the norm rather than the exception
In order to make some further progress in this direction, the present study examines event-related potentials (ERPs) generated by words in the different languages of trilingual persons performing a semantic categorization task
Notable is that in the later N400 window, L3 words elicit a larger negativity than L2 words
Summary
The human ability to understand and speak more than one language has become a topic of central importance in contemporary cognitive psychology, perhaps in part due to the acknowledgment that in today’s world, multilingualism is the norm rather than the exception. The topic likely attracts attention because of the interesting questions that arise when thinking about issues related to how information about the different languages is represented in the multilingual brain, and how access to language-specific information is controlled during language production and comprehension. The study of trilinguals raises some important questions in its own right (see e.g., Van Hell and Dijkstra, 2002; Lemhöfer et al, 2004, for studies of cognate effects in trilinguals), and provides possible ways to tackle basic questions about bilingualism and second language acquisition in the same manner that studying bilingualism can shed light on language processing in general. In order to make some further progress in this direction, the present study examines event-related potentials (ERPs) generated by words in the different languages of trilingual persons performing a semantic categorization task
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