Martin, C. 1 , Thierry, G. 2 , Kuipers, J. 2 & Costa, A. 1, 3
1 Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
2 School of Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor, UK
3 ICREA
The goal of the present study was to investigate if being bilingual affects the way people anticipate words to come when they read sentences.
Using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs), DeLong and collaborators have shown that reading an anticipated word at the end of a sentence elicits smaller N400 amplitudes than words that are not anticipated, albeit being semantically congruent with the sentence context. Interestingly, anticipatory effects were also observed on the article preceding the final word, i.e., the N400 was more negative for the article ‘an’ when the most expected final word started with a consonant, and inversely for the article ‘a’ (DeLong et al., 2005).
In this study, we investigated anticipation effects in early English-Welsh bilinguals, late Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals. Participants were asked to read English sentences while undergoing 64-channel ERP recording. Sentences ended with an expected noun starting with (a) a vowel or (b) a consonant; an unexpected noun starting with (c) a vowel or (d) a consonant.
In monolinguals, we found a significant anticipatory effect both on the final noun of the sentence and the preceding article. The N400 modulation elicited by the article was similar in early bilinguals and monolinguals. The final noun failed to modulate the N400 in early bilinguals but elicited a significant P600 effect for unanticipated final nouns. As for late bilinguals, no anticipatory effect was observed on the article while the final noun produced a typical N400 integration effect.
We interpret these results as evidence that early bilinguals anticipate the noun ending a sentence as monolinguals do. Once deceived by the actual article presented in the unanticipated condition, bilinguals reset their expectancies faster than monolinguals, thus showing no modulation of the N400 elicited by the noun. On the contrary, late bilinguals do not anticipate words to come during sentence reading.