Phonological awareness of bilinguals in visual word recognition

Abstract

The present study, in which the phonological awareness of bilinguals and the temporal characteristics of written word recognition are studied with mixed language lexical decision tests, is a part of a larger-scale research. The study aims to collect information about the temporal characteristics of word recognition at the orthographic, phonological, and semantic levels of processing. The current research explores the ERP-patterns during the recognition of Hungarian (L1) and English (L2) words, pseudo-words, and non-words. Twenty-three Hungarian–English bilingual participants were tested in an EEG laboratory. All of them have C1 level English proficiency and use English at work and in their everyday lives on a daily basis. In the lexical decision task, the N170 (left temporal electrodes) and N400 (central electrodes) components were more pronounced in word trials than in non-word trials. This activity probably reflects the integrational and meaning-matching processes during word recognition. In the language decision task on pseudo-words, the Hungarian-like strings elicited a late (300-600) negative component at the left frontal electrode sites, missing from the ERP of the English-like strings. Note that the task is different in the two experiments, which probably influences the stimulus processing and the elicited ERP waveforms as well. In the language decision task, phonological awareness has a crucial role, attributing to the observed differences.

Keywords

• eeg
• erp
• bilingual lexical decision
• visual word recognition
• phonological awareness