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Crosslinguistic interplay between semantics and phonology in late bilinguals: neurophysiological evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2018

NIKOLAY NOVITSKIY Open the ORCID record for NIKOLAY NOVITSKIY [Opens in a new window] ,
ANDRIY MYACHYKOV  and
YURY SHTYROV
NIKOLAY NOVITSKIY*
Affiliation:
Center for Cognition and Decision Making, Higher School of Economics, Russia Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China Brain and Mind Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
ANDRIY MYACHYKOV
Affiliation:
Center for Cognition and Decision Making, Higher School of Economics, Russia Department of Psychology, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK
YURY SHTYROV
Affiliation:
Center for Cognition and Decision Making, Higher School of Economics, Russia Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Institute for Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Denmark
*
Address for Correspondence: Nikolay Novitskiy, PhD, Department of Linguistics & Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong SARnikolai.novitski@gmail.com
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Abstract

We investigated effects of crosslinguistic phonological and semantic similarity on the bilingual lexicon of late unbalanced bilinguals. Our masked priming paradigm used L1 (Russian) words as masked primes and L2 (English) words as targets. The primes and the targets either overlapped – phonologically, semantically, both phonologically and semantically – or did not overlap. Participants maintained the targets in memory and matched them against occasionally presented catch stimuli. N170 and N400 components of the word-elicited high-density ERPs were identified and analysed in signal and source space. Crosslinguistic semantic similarity shortened the reaction times. The semantics-related N400 amplitude difference correlated with individual L2 proficiency, while phonological similarity suppressed the N400 amplitude in the semantically unrelated condition. ERP source analysis suggests that these ERP dynamics are underpinned by cortical generators in the left IFG and the temporal pole. We conclude that the semantic and phonological interplay between L1 and L2 suggest an integrated bilingual lexicon.

Keywords

bilingualshomophonesRussianmasked primingERPN170N400non-selective access
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 209 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

Supplementary material can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728918000627

*The study has been supported by the HSE Basic Research Program, Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’, Russian Foundation for Basic Research project 16-06-00468, NRU Higher School of Economics, Aarhus University and the Lundbeck Foundation (Denmark; project 15480 Neolex). We thank Elena Kulkova for her help with the data collection and Olga Martynova for valuable comments at the project design stage.

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