Language non-selective syntactic activation in early bilinguals: the role of verbal fluency

Abstract

Numerous studies have shown that bilinguals presented with words in one of their languages spontaneously and automatically activate lexical representations from their other language. However, such effects, found in varied experimental contexts, both in behavioural and psychophysiological investigations, have been essentially limited to the lexical-semantic domain. Using brain potentials in a mental decision task in early highly proficient Welsh–English bilinguals and English monolingual controls, a recent study suggests that language non-selective effects exist in the domain of syntax. In this paper, we test whether syntactic access in bilinguals is affected by relative language abilities, as indexed by verbal fluency measures in the bilingual's two languages. Results reveal that non-selective syntax in English sentence comprehension is limited to bilinguals with higher Welsh verbal fluency. This result suggests for the first time directionality in cross-language syntactic activation in early bilinguals.

Keywords:

• bilingualism
• syntactic processing
• sentence comprehension
• language non-selective access
• event-related potentials
• N200

Acknowledgements

We thank Dirk Bury, Benjamin Dering, Virginia Gathercole, Noriko Hoshino, Nia Jones, Jan-Rouke Kuipers, Mark Roberts, Nicola Savill, Marco Tamburelli, Enlli Thomas and Yanjing Wu for their assistance with this project. We are also grateful to the editors and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council UK [grant number ES/E024556/1]. GT was supported by the European Research Council [grant number ERC-SG-209704]; the British Academy [grant number BA-MD120036].