| Abstract | dc.description.abstract | One of the most intriguing aspects of cognition is the way the bilingual brain deals
with two languages. In this sense, a central question is whether knowledge of one
language interferes in the processing of the other in everyday language use. The
present thesis studied cross-language lexical interaction in highly proficient
Spanish-English bilinguals who learnt English as a second language after age 10.
A semantic incongruity task was used in which bilinguals read English sentences
whose final words were either congruent or incongruent with the rest of the
sentence context. While participants performed the task, their neural activity was
recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). Event-related potentials (ERPs)
were extracted and the semantic incongruity marker, N400, was used to assess
electrical brain activity. Critical stimuli were English words whose Spanish
translation equivalents shared an initial segment of their phonological
representations with those of the most expected words for each sentence. For
example, in the sentence “My brother swept the floor with a...”, 'broom' is an
expected and congruent final word, while 'foam' is an incongruent ending.
However, the Spanish translation equivalents of these words, 'escoba' and
'espuma', respectively, start with the same syllable. Participants showed no
differences in N400 amplitudes for incongruent words with this sound repetition
compared with incongruent endings without it (e.g. broom-foam; escoba-espuma
vs. broom-dessert; escoba-postre). However, significant differences were found in
N400 peak latencies, in which incongruent words that had this initial sound
repetition peaked significantly later than incongruent words without phonological
overlap. These results suggest a co-activation of English and Spanish words
during second language word comprehension in sentence reading, supporting and
extending the view that bilingual word processing is non-selective. | en_US |
