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The time-course of morphosyntactic and semantic priming in late bilinguals: A study of German adjectives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2016

SINA BOSCH ,
HELENA KRAUSE  and
ALINA LEMINEN
SINA BOSCH*
Affiliation:
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam
HELENA KRAUSE
Affiliation:
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam
ALINA LEMINEN
Affiliation:
Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience and MINDLab, Aarhus University Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki
*
Address for Correspondence: Sina Bosch, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 24–25, 14476 Potsdam, Germanysbmbpo@gmail.com
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Abstract

How do late proficient bilinguals process morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in their non-native language (L2)? How is this information represented in the L2 mental lexicon? And what are the neural signatures of L2 morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic processing? We addressed these questions in one behavioral and two ERP priming experiments on inflected German adjectives testing a group of advanced late Russian learners of German in comparison to native speaker (L1) controls. While in the behavioral experiment, the L2 learners performed native-like, the ERP data revealed clear L1/L2 differences with respect to the temporal dynamics of grammatical processing. Specifically, our results show that L2 morphosyntactic processing yielded temporally and spatially extended brain responses relative to L1 processing, indicating that grammatical processing of inflected words in an L2 is more demanding and less automatic than in the L1. However, this group of advanced L2 learners showed native-like lexical-semantic processing.

Keywords

InflectionEEGGrammatical ProcessingMental Lexicon
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 435 - 456
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

The research reported here was supported by an Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professorship to Harald Clahsen and a postgraduate studentship from the German National Academic Foundation to SB. AL is supported by Lundbeck Foundation and KONE Foundation. We are grateful to the members of the Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism for detailed and helpful comments on the present work, in particular to Harald Clahsen.

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