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. 2024 Mar 21;14(1):6818.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-57426-y.

Language prediction in monolingual and bilingual speakers: an EEG study

Mohammad Momenian  1   2 , Mahsa Vaghefi  3 , Hamidreza Sadeghi  4 , Saeedeh Momtazi  4 , Lars Meyer  5
Affiliations

Language prediction in monolingual and bilingual speakers: an EEG study

Mohammad Momenian et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Prediction of upcoming words is thought to be crucial for language comprehension. Here, we are asking whether bilingualism entails changes to the electrophysiological substrates of prediction. Prior findings leave it open whether monolingual and bilingual speakers predict upcoming words to the same extent and in the same manner. We address this issue with a naturalistic approach, employing an information-theoretic metric, surprisal, to predict and contrast the N400 brain potential in monolingual and bilingual speakers. We recruited 18 Iranian Azeri-Persian bilingual speakers and 22 Persian monolingual speakers. Subjects listened to a story in Persian while their electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. Bayesian item-level analysis was used. While in monolingual speakers N400 was sensitive to information-theoretic properties of both the current and previous words, in bilingual speakers N400 reflected the properties of the previous word only. Our findings show evidence for a processing delay in bilingual speakers which is consistent with prior research.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Posterior predictions and effects of Surprisal and Surprisal_PW on average ERP across the two groups. Variables are standardized. (a) The area in the middle of each distribution shows the 95% credible interval. The vertical line in the middle of shaded area is posterior mean. Group is deviation coded (− 0.5 and 0.5). (b) Surprisal of the current word has different effects on ERP in both groups. (c) Spill-over effect is shown here where surprisal of the previous word predicted the ERP of the current word. Higher surprisal of the previous word results in more negative ERP in both groups. The shades are confidence intervals with outer probability = 0.89 and inner probability = 0.50. Negative is plotted down.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Mean ERP for 6 channels of interest for both groups after low pass filtering and demeaning. Zero on the x axis is aligned to the onset of the target word. No baseline correction was applied here.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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