Code-switching effects in bilingual word recognition: a masked priming study with event-related potentials

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics
• Electrophysiology

Background:

• Understanding language switching in bilinguals is crucial for cognitive science.
• Previous research often involves overt task switching, making automatic language switching less understood.
• Event-related potentials (ERPs) offer high temporal resolution to study rapid cognitive processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate automatic language switching effects in bilinguals using a priming paradigm.
• To examine the temporal dynamics of language switching by analyzing ERP components.
• To determine if language switching effects occur without explicit task-switching demands.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments employed a masked priming paradigm with bilingual participants.
• Participants performed a lexical decision task, monitoring for animal names.
• Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded, focusing on N400 and N250 components.

Main Results:

• Language switching effects were observed and modulated by the target language.
• For L1 targets, language switching effects were prominent in the N400 component.
• For L2 targets, language switching effects were mainly observed in the earlier N250 component.

Conclusions:

• This study provides the first electrophysiological evidence for rapid, automatic language switching.
• Language switching effects manifest differently in the N400 and N250 ERP components depending on target language.
• These findings suggest distinct neural mechanisms underlying language control in bilinguals, even without overt task switching.