Poster No:
1010
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Juraj Jonáš1, Jan Štrobl1, Vlastimil Koudelka1, Mabel Rodriguez1
Institutions:
1National Institute of Mental Health, Klecany, Česká republika
First Author:
Juraj Jonáš
National Institute of Mental Health
Klecany, Česká republika
Co-Author(s):
Jan Štrobl
National Institute of Mental Health
Klecany, Česká republika
Mabel Rodriguez
National Institute of Mental Health
Klecany, Česká republika
Introduction:
Previous studies in bilingualism have focused on the factors, such as the age of second language acquisition, its attained proficiency level, the manner of acquisition, or relative dominance of one language over the other. Several studies suggest that language similarity may also significantly influence cognitive and language functioning. Behavioral studies suggest that language similarity has an effect on mechanisms of lexical and syntactical representation and selection (Cui, & Shen, 2016; Huang et al., 2019), selective attention (Olguin et al., 2019), and executive functions (Oschwald et al., 2018). There has been however lacking the studies which would look into processing on the neurophysiological level.
Methods:
Participants: three groups of bilingual participants (N=23) were compared: 1. bilinguals with similar (mutually intelligible languages as reported by van Heuven et al., 2015) - Slovak and Czech languages; 2. bilinguals with different languages - Czech and German and 3. bilinguals with partly mutually intelligible languages - Czech and Russian. Language status of participants was measured with the Language History Questionnaire 2.0.
Procedure: Two event-related potentials experiments have been conducted. Participants did both paradigms in both of their languages. Results of both languages were averaged.
1. N200 experiment consisted of go/no-go task, where participants were asked to react only to objects (visual) with feminine grammatical gender. In case of other grammatical gender they were supposed to withhold reaction. Incongruent stimuli were stimuli with different gram. gender in subject's both languages. Incongruent stimuli should elicit larger N200 wave. In general, bilinguals elicit larger N200 in incongruent verbal stimuli than monolinguals. N200 measures the cognitive inhibition. We expected different N200 effect (the difference between avarage reaction to congruent and incongruent stimuli) for each language group.
2. N400 experiment was based on Semantic violation task: Subjects were presented semantically correct or incorrect sentences. Participants were ask to react to the incorrect ones only. Semantically violated stimuli elicit larger amplitude in bilinguals than in monolinguals. We hypothesized that N400 ERP would differ in accordance to language similarity.
Results:
Analysis: peaks of average congruent and incongruent wave were defined for each participant. These were subtracted, so te ERP effect was found. This was done for both, the N200 and N400 wave.
N200 amplitude: Shapiro-Wilk test did not show normal distribution, so Kruskal-Wallis test was applied. Between groups no significant difference has been found.
N200 latency: 2-factor mixed-design with a use of an M-estimator and bootstrap with Bonferoni correction for 2 tests had been used. No difference between groups was observed.
N400 amplitude: Normal distribution and homogeneity of data had not been rejected (Shapiro-Wilk test, Leven test), 2-factor mixed ANOVA had been used. Significant differences between German and Russian group (p=0.0147) and also between German and Slovak group (p=0.0074) ahs been observed.
N400 latency: 2-factor mixed-design (M-estimator and bootstrap) had been used. Significant difference in latency was observed between Russian and Slovak group (p=0,0006).
Conclusions:
No effect of the language similarity on language processing, neither in terms of amplitude nor latency has been observed on N200 ERP. However, differences were observed in both N400 latency and amplitude. This difference however might have been a result of different script (Russian use Azbuka, all other languages use Latin script).
We conclude that early language processing (cognitive inhibition) is not affected by language similarity, but late processing is (semantic). Language similarity might be one of the factors behind a large inconsistency in bilingual research data.
Higher Cognitive Functions:
Executive Function, Cognitive Control and Decision Making
Language:
Language Comprehension and Semantics 1
Language Other 2
Keywords:
ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY
Other - bilingualism, ERPs
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
Provide references using author date format
Huang, J., Pickering, M. J., Chen, X., Cai, Z., Wang, S., & Branigan, H. P. (2019). Does language similarity affect representational integration?. Cognition, 185, 83-90.
Olguin, A., Cekic, M., Bekinschtein, T. A., Katsos, N., & Bozic, M. (2019). Bilingualism and language similarity modify the neural mechanisms of selective attention. Scientific reports, 9(1), 1-14.
Oschwald, J., Schättin, A., Von Bastian, C. C., & Souza, A. S. (2018). Bidialectalism and bilingualism: Exploring the role of language similarity as a link between linguistic ability and executive control. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1997.
van Heuven, V. J., Gooskens, C. S., Bezooijen, R. V., & Navracsics J, B. S. (2015). Introducing Micrela: Predicting mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe. In: Studies in Psycholinguistics, 127-145.