Evidence of non-selective lexical access to second and third language in unbalanced multilinguals: an N400 study on the processing of interlingual homographs

Author(s)

Marina Fernandes Neves Lameira ^[1] ; Felipe Rodrigues Bezerra ^[2] ; Pâmela Freitas Pereira Toassi ^[3] ; André Mascioli Cravo ^[4] ; Maria Teresa Carthery-Goulart ^[5]

Affiliation

^[1] Universidade Federal do ABC. Programa de Pós-graduação em Neurociência e Cognição. Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição (CMCC) - Brasil

^[2] Universidade Federal do ABC. Programa de Pós-graduação em Neurociência e Cognição. Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição (CMCC) - Brasil

^[3] Universidade Federal do Ceará. Departamento de Estudos da Língua Inglesa, suas Literaturas e Tradução. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos da Tradução (POET) e Programa de Pós-Graduação em Linguística (PPGLin) - Brasil

^[4] Universidade Federal do ABC. Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição (CMCC). Programa de Pós-graduação em Neurociência e Cognição - Brasil

^[5] Universidade Federal do ABC. Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição (CMCC). Programa de Pós-graduação em Neurociência e Cognição - Brasil

• Document type: Journal article
• Source: Pandaemonium Germanicum; v. 26, n. 49, p. 35-67, 2023-05-01.

Abstract

Abstract Bilinguals and multilinguals commonly encounter words in their multiple languages which share some linguistic aspects. Among those are interlingual homographs, or words that have the exact same orthography in two different languages. The current study examined, through a semantic judgment task in English with ERP recording, how multilinguals (speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, English and German) accessed the meanings of interlingual homographs that belonged to their dominant and non-dominant foreign languages compared to a control group of Brazilian Portuguese-English bilinguals. The findings demonstrated that multilinguals were slower to respond to the English-German interlingual homographs as compared to control stimuli (no homographs). The results also demonstrated that, when the interlingual homographs were semantically related to their targets in the non-target language, there were significantly more errors and a higher RT than in unrelated conditions. Additionally, only the bilinguals presented the typical N400 effect for unrelated conditions, suggesting that the co-activation of the non-target language due to interlingual homographs modulated this ERP in the multilingual group. Our results provide support for the Bilingual Interactive Activation plus model and suggest that literature findings on interference between first and second languages also hold for second and third languages. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 17/00246-0 - Lexical access in trilinguals: eletrophysiological data on the processing of interlingual homographs
• Grantee: Marina Fernandes Neves Lameira
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master