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Impact of inhibitory control demands on subsequent processing and judgment of semantically weakly related L2-L1 word pairs: an ERP study
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Poster D94 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Karolina Rataj1, Walter van Heuven2, Patrycja Kakuba1; 1Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 2School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, the United Kingdom
Radel et al. (2015) reported a behavioral hyperpriming effect for semantically weakly related word pairs in the first language (L1) when inhibitory control demands were high on a preceding conflict task. At the same time, research has shown that language switching requires inhibitory control not only in language production, but also in language comprehension (Bosma & Pablos, 2020). Inspired by these findings, we investigated in an event-related potential (ERP) experiment whether processing of semantically weakly related word pairs in a cross-language (L2-L1) situation is modulated by inhibitory control demands in a prior task. Following Radel et al. (2015), we employed a Simon task in two sessions (2,000 trials in each session) in a within-subject design. The High demands session included 50% incongruent trials, and the Low demands session, 10% of incongruent trials.The Simon task was followed by a semantic relatedness task, in which participants evaluated strongly related (SR), weakly related (WR), and unrelated (UR) word pairs. A delayed response procedure was used, with a response trigger presented 1,000 ms post target. Twenty-six Polish proficient learners of English participated in the study. Behavioral analysis revealed a larger congruency effect in the Simon task in the Low demands than in the High demands session. Importantly, semantic relatedness judgments were modulated by inhibitory control demands in the prior Simon task; reaction times for WR pairs were numerically shorter than for UR pairs after the Low demands Simon task, but were significantly slower than for UR pairs after the High demands Simon task. ERP results showed that the N400 amplitudes for the WR pairs were smaller than those for the UR pairs after the Low demands task, whereas after the High demands task they did not differ. Overall, the results did not show a hyperpriming effect that was observed in the behavioral study by Radel et al. (2015). The reaction times to WR pairs were actually longer than to UR pairs when inhibitory control demands in the preceding task were high. Also, the ERP results showed that the N400 amplitudes for the WR pairs converged with those for the UR pairs following the high demands Simon task. This effect might mean that when participants performed a demanding cognitive control task, they became better at inhibiting the responses (as confirmed by the modulation of the Simon congruency effect) when the number of incongruent trials was large, and this increase in inhibition later impacted both semantic processing and semantic judgments of weak semantic relations. Alternatively, the effect may be due to language switching in cross-language (L2-L1) word pairs, so that high inhibition demands in the conflict task resulted in stronger inhibition in the semantic relatedness task for WR pairs, thereby eliminating the facilitatory effect.
Topic Areas: Control, Selection, and Executive Processes, Multilingualism