Sentence processing in monolinguals and trilinguals

ABSTRACT

Extensive research exists on language processing in both monolinguals and bilinguals. Yet, whether the trends observed in these groups also apply to trilinguals remains to be determined. A deeper understanding of sentence processing in trilinguals could shed light on the theoretical foundations of multilingualism. This study compared conflict sentence processing in monolinguals and trilinguals during a conflict resolution task. Eighteen participants from both monolingual and trilingual groups undertook semantic acceptability and syntactic judgment tasks. Both behavioral (reaction time and accuracy) and electrophysiological (latency and amplitude) responses were recorded. The behavioral analysis showed no significant differences in accuracy between the groups for either task. However, monolinguals demonstrated shorter reaction times for both tasks. Electrophysiological data suggested variations between trilinguals and monolinguals based on the task type. Trilinguals had shorter latency times for the syntactic judgment task and higher amplitude responses for the semantic acceptability task. These findings indicate distinct sentence processing methods between monolinguals and trilinguals, as evidenced by the electrophysiological results. The growing body of research on trilingualism suggests that acquiring additional languages influences cognitive and linguistic processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Sentence processing
• conflict resolution
• trilinguals
• monolinguals
• electrophysiology

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the EGI team who assisted in setting up the experiment and the research assistants who helped with the data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.