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Reading Russian–English homographs in sentence contexts: Evidence from ERPs*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2013

OLESSIA JOURAVLEV  and
DEBRA JARED
OLESSIA JOURAVLEV
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
DEBRA JARED*
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
*
Address for correspondence: Debra Jared, Department of Psychology, Social Sciences Centre, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, CanadaN6A 5C2djjared@uwo.ca
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Abstract

The current study investigated whether Russian–English bilinguals activate knowledge of Russian when reading English sentences. Russian and English share only a few letters, but there are some interlingual homographs (e.g., POT, which means “mouth” in Russian). Critical sentences were written such that the Russian meaning of the homographs fit the context. Sentences presented to participants contained either the English translation of the Russian meaning of a homograph, an interlingual homograph, or a control word (e.g., TO SEE TOM'S THROAT, THE DOCTOR ASKED TOM TO OPEN HIS MOUTH/POT/NET WIDELY). Bilinguals showed a reduction in the N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP) signal for interlingual homographs compared to control words, whereas the N400 of monolingual English speakers was of a similar magnitude in the two conditions. The finding provides evidence that bilinguals automatically activate representations in both of their languages when reading in one language, even when the combination of a language-specific script and the preceding language context indicates that the other language is not relevant.

Keywords

bilingualcross-languagecross-scriptinterlingual homographsRussian–EnglishERP
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 153 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grant to DJ and by an Academic Development Fund grant from the University of Western Ontario. We would like to thank Marc Joanisse, Wouter Duyck, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous drafts of the manuscript.

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