Event-related potentials associated with cognitive mechanisms underlying lexical-semantic processing in monolingual and bilingual 18-month-old children

Rämä, Pia and Sirri, Louah and Goyet, Louise (2018) Event-related potentials associated with cognitive mechanisms underlying lexical-semantic processing in monolingual and bilingual 18-month-old children. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 47. pp. 123-130. ISSN 0911-6044

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Abstract

Prior to their second birthday, children are sensitive to the semantic relatedness between spoken words. Yet, it remains unclear whether simultaneous second language acquisition affects this sensitivity. Here, we investigated the influence of early acquisition of two languages on the event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with lexical-semantic processing of spoken words in 18-month-old monolingual and bilingual children. Children were exposed to an auditory semantic priming task in French, while their ERPs were recorded. Word pairs were either semantically related (e.g., train-bike) or unrelated (e.g., chicken-bike), and they were presented at two stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA). The results revealed that only monolingual children exhibited a semantic priming effect at the short SOA while at the long SOA condition, both monolingual and bilingual children exhibited more pronounced ERPs in response to unrelated compared with related target words. This finding suggests that both language groups are sensitive to taxonomic relations between words but activation of semantic network might be less automatized or slower in bilingual children.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Journal of Neurolinguistics
Additional Information:
This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Neurolinguistics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Neurolinguistics, 47 2018 DOI: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2018.04.012
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3310
Subjects:
?? semantic priminglanguage-related erpsbilingualsautomatic activationcontrolled mechanismslanguage developmentlinguistics and languagecognitive neuroscienceexperimental and cognitive psychology ??
ID Code:
125340
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
22 May 2018 12:34
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
15 Jan 2024 00:15