Dunabeitia, J. A. 1 , Dimitropoulou, M. 1, 2 , Raphael, D. 1 & Carreiras, M. 1, 3, 4
1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Donostia. Spain.
2 University of La Laguna
3 Ikerbasque. Basque Foundation for Science
4 Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea – Universidad del País Vasco
The way in which a third language (L3) is represented in the multilingual mind and whether it interacts with the previously acquired languages remains largely understudied. The present studies aims at shedding further light into these issues by examining the electrophysiological correlates of the cognate facilitation effect in a trilingual sample. Studies testing bilingual populations have repeatedly shown that the processing of cognate words (e.g., the English word guitar and its Spanish translation guitarra), is less demanding than the processing of non-cognates. Nevertheless, only a limited number of studies have examined the processing of cognate words across the three languages of a trilingual individual. In order to reveal the time course of this effect, the event-related brain potentials of a group of native speakers of Spanish (L1) with a high level of proficiency in Basque (L2) and an average knowledge of English (L3) were recorded. Participants were visually presented with English words that were either i) L1-L3 cognates (i.e., two-language cognates), ii) L1-L2-L3 cognates (i.e., three-language cognates), or iii) non-cognates. Results showed smaller N400 amplitudes for two and three-language cognates as compared to the non-cognate words, suggesting that cognates were always easier to process as compared to non-cognates. Critically, we found no differences in the magnitude of this N400 effect for the three-language cognates as compared to the two-language cognates, suggesting that three-language cognates do not imply any specific processing advantage as compared to two-language cognates. To our knowledge, this is the first electrophysiological evidence of cross-language interactions in trilingual speakers. Our findings could provide valuable insights into the way in which a third language could be incorporated into models of bilingual lexico-semantic organization.