Does MOED Rhyme with FRUIT? An event-related potential study of cross-language rhyming

The study aimed to characterize the event-related potentials signature elicited by visual rhyme judgements across two alphabetic orthographies that differ in depth (shallow: Dutch; deep: English) and by spelling-sound consistency in a deep L2-English orthography. Twenty-four Dutch-English bilinguals who varied on measures of L2-English proficiency, made rhyme judgments of semantically unrelated Dutch-English word pairs presented sequentially in the visual modality, while behavioral and electrophysiological responses were recorded. The spelling-sound consistency of target words was varied systematically. Nonrhyming targets elicited a larger N450 amplitude than rhyming targets, indicating sensitivity to mismatching phonology across languages. English target words with consistent spelling-sound mappings elicited less negative N250 amplitudes when preceded by rhyming Dutch primes. Overall, event-related potentials revealed robust responses to phonological mismatch, but subtle responses to spelling-sound inconsistency in L2-English. Results suggest that bilingual readers of a shallow L1 orthography who are immersed in an L1-speaking environment may not tune into the degree of spelling-sound consistency of a deep L2 orthography.