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Effects of Disconfirmed Linguistic Predictions on Memory in Bilinguals
Poster A28 in Poster Session A - Sandbox Series, Thursday, October 24, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 4
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Elaina jahanfard1,2, Tamara Swaab1,2; 1UC Davis, 2Center for Mind and Brain
Research on prediction during language processing has mainly focused on its immediate effects, both in monolingual and bilingual individuals. Recent studies have examined the downstream consequences of unmet predictions in monolinguals, showing that they not only impact language processing but also memory for text. Prior research suggests that when predictions are disconfirmed, they can lead to false memories for words that were predicted but never actually encountered (Rommers & Federmeier, 2018; Hubbard et al., 2024). Haeuser & Kray (2022) showed that these false memories were restricted to words that were semantically related to the disconfirmed predictions (e.g., clown – circus), but were not found for words that were phonologically related (e.g., clown – cloud). However, previous research indicates that the mental lexicon in bilingual individuals is organized more according to phonological relations than semantic relatedness, compared to monolinguals. This suggests that bilinguals are more likely to activate phonologically similar words during sentence processing, thereby increasing the proportion of phonological prediction errors and the likelihood of false memory for unmet phonological predictions. The present study aims to investigate how unmet phonological and semantic predictions affect the susceptibility to false memories in bilingual individuals. We will measure heritage Spanish-English bilingual participants’ ERPs to predictable and unpredictable sentence-final words in moderately constraining contexts and ask them to indicate whether they had accurately predicted the sentence-final word. Participants’ prediction accuracy will be recorded via button press after each trial to determine whether they correctly anticipated the final word. We will compare ERPs to successfully predicted words against unsuccessfully predicted words for which the context was equally supportive. Additionally, we will compare responses to two types of unsuccessfully predicted words: those that were contextually supported but not predicted, and those that were contextually unsupported. The experiment will be divided into encoding and retrieval test blocks. After each encoding block, participants will complete a memory test with a confidence scale involving old words, new words, semantic lures, and phonological lures. This study will enable us to test our hypotheses regarding bilinguals' susceptibility to phonological versus semantic false memories for unmet predictions during encoding. The results will provide insights into how bilingualism influences the cognitive processes underlying prediction error and memory.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism,