Electrophysiological and behavioural measures of bilingual lexical processing

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While substantial recent progress has been made in establishing the effects of bilingualism on language comprehension, much remains to be understood about the ways in which bilingualism gives rise to subtle alterations at orthographic, phonological and semantic levels of lexical processing. The present program of research aims to modify cutting-edge models of the timecourse of monolingual visual and spoken word recognition to take into account the effects of bilingualism, including: (a) the effects of non-target language information on visual and spoken word recognition; (b) the ways in which speaker characteristics (e.g., proficiency, age of acquisition) modify the effects of bilingualism on language processing; and (c) the impact on language processing of changes in neurocognitive processing in bilinguals. To answer these questions, we use behavioural and ERP methods. We propose three sets of experiments examining:1) the role of non-target language orthographic and phonological competitors on word recognition in both auditory and visual modalities (Specific Aim 1);2) the extent to which semantic effects attested in monolinguals are also observed in bilinguals, and the effect of L2 semantic information on L1 processing (Specific Aim 2);3) neurocognitive changes that occur with bilingualism, and the ways in which they influence language processing (Specific Aim 3).The proposed research will provide a basis for training 3 graduate students and several undergraduate students. Honours and graduate students and other HQP receive training in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience methods in my lab. Trainees are involved in all aspects of the research: conceptualization, stimulus selection, experimental design, subject recruitment, preparation and programming of behavioral, and ERP tasks, and data collection and analysis. They are also trained in administration of neurocognitive tasks, interpretation of results, and manuscript preparation.