Presentation
Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions | Lightning Talks
Predictive Processing in Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals: An ERP investigation.
There is a Poster PDF for this presentation, but you must be a current member or registered to attend SNL 2023 to view it. Please go to your Account Home page to register.
Poster E35 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Elaina Jahanfard1, Haitong Zhu1, Tamara Swaab1; 1University of California, Davis
There is abundant evidence to suggest that actively predicting upcoming language input (Predictive Processing) facilitates language comprehension. Studies of PP in bilingual language users have yielded mixed results. Some studies have found no evidence of facilitation of prediction on L2 (Grüter et al., 2012) and some show that facilitation due to PP in L2 is delayed (Frenck-Mestre & Pynte, 1997; Chun and Kaan 2019; Trenkic et al., 2014). More recently, Zirnstein and colleagues (2018) have demonstrated that language experience and use are critical predictors of facilitative effects of PP on L2, which could explain the mixed findings observed in previous research. To further examine the role of language experience and use on the effects of prediction in L2, an ERP study will be conducted with two groups of bilingual participants who are undergraduate students at UC Davis: 1) Spanish-English heritage speakers (N=30) who have lived in an English dominant language environment, and Chinese English bilinguals (N=30) who learned English at a later age, and who have lived in a Chinese dominant language environment until they came to UC Davis. Participants in both groups will be proficient in English as established by the LHQ-3 and LexTALE. All participants will participate in a two-word visual priming paradigm. Half of the target words are related in meaning to the prime word, and half are unrelated. The task of the participants will be to predict the target word (before it is presented) after they have seen the prime. ERPs to target words will be compared in three conditions for the two 1) unrelated target words, 2) related target words that were accurately predicted 3) related target words that were not predicted. Results of a study in monolingual English speakers (Trammel et al., under revision) showed earlier and greater facilitation (reduced N400) to related target words that were correctly predicted relative to related incorrectly predicted target words and unrelated target words, indicating primacy of prediction over semantic relatedness. Furthermore, effects of concreteness and orthographic neighborhood were only observed for the unrelated and incorrectly predicted target words. This indicates that both semantic and orthographic features of the target word were pre-activated when they were correctly predicted. It is predicted that this pattern of results will replicate for the Spanish-English bilinguals. For the Chinese English bilinguals, it is predicted that they will show delayed facilitative effects of correct prediction. Given the differences in script, it is further predicted that Chinese-English bilinguals will not show evidence of pre-activation of orthographic features. Results of this study will contribute to a better understanding of individual differences in PP in bilinguals as a function of the age of acquisition, the dominant language in their environment, and differences in script.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism,