Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2008 Dec 30:1246:123-35.
doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2008.09.078. Epub 2008 Oct 9.

An electrophysiological investigation of cross-language effects of orthographic neighborhood

Katherine J Midgley  1 , Phillip J Holcomb, Walter J B VanHeuven, Jonathan Grainger
Affiliations

An electrophysiological investigation of cross-language effects of orthographic neighborhood

Katherine J Midgley et al. Brain Res. .

Abstract

In Experiment 1 ERPs were recorded while French-English bilinguals read pure language lists of French and English words that differed in terms of the number of orthographic neighbors (many or few) they had in the other language. That is the number of French neighbors for English target words was varied and the number of English neighbors for French target words was varied. These participants showed effects of cross-language neighborhood size in the N400 ERP component that arose earlier and were more widely distributed for English (L2) target words than French (L1) targets. In a control experiment that served to demonstrate that these effects were not due to any other uncontrolled for item effects, monolingual L1 English participants read only the list of English targets that varied in the number of French (an unknown L) neighbors. These participants showed a very different pattern of effects of cross-language neighbors. These results provide further crucial evidence showing cross-language permeability in bilingual word recognition, a phenomena that was predicted and correctly simulated by the bilingual interactive-activation model (BIA+).

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Figure 1a. Results of bilinguals reading English (L2) targets with either many orthographic neighbors in French (L1) or few orthographic neighbors in French. Figure 1b. Scalp voltage maps at three time points between English words with few French neighbors and many French neighbors (units are in microvolts)
Figure 1
Figure 1
Figure 1a. Results of bilinguals reading English (L2) targets with either many orthographic neighbors in French (L1) or few orthographic neighbors in French. Figure 1b. Scalp voltage maps at three time points between English words with few French neighbors and many French neighbors (units are in microvolts)
Figure 2
Figure 2
Figure 2a. Results of bilinguals reading French (L1) targets with either many orthographic neighbors in English (L2) or few orthographic neighbors in English. Figure 2b. Scalp voltage maps at three time points between French words with few English neighbors and many English neighbors.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Figure 2a. Results of bilinguals reading French (L1) targets with either many orthographic neighbors in English (L2) or few orthographic neighbors in English. Figure 2b. Scalp voltage maps at three time points between French words with few English neighbors and many English neighbors.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Figure 3a. Results of the monolinguals reading English targets with either many orthographic neighbors in French or few orthographic neighbors in French. Figure 3b. Scalp voltage maps showing the difference at three time points between English words with few French neighbors and many French neighbors.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Figure 3a. Results of the monolinguals reading English targets with either many orthographic neighbors in French or few orthographic neighbors in French. Figure 3b. Scalp voltage maps showing the difference at three time points between English words with few French neighbors and many French neighbors.
Figure 4
Figure 4. Schematic of two trials in the English block, one with a target word (grape) and another with a probe word requiring a button pressing response (foot)
Figure 5
Figure 5. Electrode Montage and analysis sites (in grey)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Alvarez RP, Holcomb PJ, Grainger J. Accessing word meaning in two languages: An event-related brain potential study of beginning bilinguals. Brain Language. 2003;87(2):290–304. - PubMed
    1. Andrews S. Frequency and neighborhood effects on lexical access: Activation or search? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 1989;15(5):802–814.
    1. Andrews S. The effect of orthographic similarity on lexical retrieval: Resolving neighborhood conflicts. Psychonomic Bulletin Review. 1997;4(4):439–461.
    1. Baayen RH, Piepenbrock R, Gulikers L. The celex lexical database. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium; 1995.
    1. Beauvillain C, Grainger J. Accessing interlexical homographs: Some limitations of a language-selective access. Journal of Memory and Language. 1987;26(6):658–672.

Publication types