Martín, M. C. , Macizo, P. & Bajo, M. T.
University of Granada (Spain)
Much of the bilingual language processing research has focused on understanding the control mechanisms that allow the bilinguals to overcome the negative influence of activating their two languages. One of the mechanisms proposed to manage cross-languages competition has been the inhibition of the irrelevant items (Green, 1998). Although most of the empirical evidence supporting inhibitory processes in bilingual processing has come from the language production domain, there is no clear evidence to support these inhibitory processes in bilingual language comprehension. However, the results of recent studies show the existence of inhibitory processes in bilingual language comprehension (Macizo, Bajo, & Martín, in press; Martín, Macizo, & Bajo, in press). In this study we explore this issue further by using interlexical homographs as critical stimuli (e.g., pie meaning foot in Spanish). Spanish-English bilinguals performed an English lexical decision task while recording both reaction times and EEG measures. Regarding the event-related potentials (ERPs), we focused on both the N200 and the N400 components. These components have been associated with cognitive control mechanisms needed to overcome cross-language interference effects (N200) and with the difficulty to access to lexico-semantic information (Kutas & Van Petten, 1994; Moreno, Rodríguez-Fornells, & Laine, 2008). The reaction times and the ERP amplitude were sensitive to cross-language activation in the presence of homographs as compared to control words. Moreover, after responding to homographs, bilinguals slowed their responses to the English translation of the Spanish homograph meaning. The results are considered in the framework of bilingual language processing.