Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, IDIBELL, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain.
Psychophysiology. 2018 Oct;55(10):e13196. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13196. Epub 2018 May 6.
We investigated how native language experience shapes anticipatory language processing. Two groups of bilinguals (either Spanish or Basque natives) performed a word matching task (WordMT) and a picture matching task (PictureMT). They indicated whether the stimuli they visually perceived matched with the noun they heard. Spanish noun endings were either diagnostic of the gender (transparent) or ambiguous (opaque). ERPs were time-locked to an intervening gender-marked determiner preceding the predicted noun. The determiner always gender agreed with the following noun but could also introduce a mismatching noun, so that it was not fully task diagnostic. Evoked brain activity time-locked to the determiner was considered as reflecting updating/reanalysis of the task-relevant preactivated representation. We focused on the timing of this effect by estimating the comparison between a gender-congruent and a gender-incongruent determiner. In the WordMT, both groups showed a late N400 effect. Crucially, only Basque natives displayed an earlier P200 effect for determiners preceding transparent nouns. In the PictureMT, both groups showed an early P200 effect for determiners preceding opaque nouns. The determiners of transparent nouns triggered a negative effect at ∼430 ms in Spanish natives, but at ∼550 ms in Basque natives. This pattern of results supports a "retracing hypothesis" according to which the neurocognitive system navigates through the intermediate (sublexical and lexical) linguistic representations available from previous processing to evaluate the need of an update in the linguistic expectation concerning a target lexical item.
我们研究了母语经验如何影响语言预期处理。两组双语者（西班牙语母语者或巴斯克语母语者）完成了一项词语匹配任务（WordMT）和一项图片匹配任务（PictureMT）。他们需要判断他们看到的刺激是否与他们听到的名词匹配。西班牙语名词结尾要么是性别可预测的（透明的），要么是模棱两可的（不透明的）。ERPs 与在预测名词之前出现的带有性别标记的限定词时间锁定。这个限定词总是与后面的名词性别一致，但也可以引入一个不匹配的名词，因此它不完全是任务诊断。与限定词时间锁定的诱发脑活动被认为反映了对任务相关的预先激活表示的更新/重新分析。我们通过估计性别一致和性别不一致的限定词之间的比较，来关注这个效应的时间。在 WordMT 中，两组都显示出了晚期 N400 效应。至关重要的是，只有巴斯克语母语者在透明名词之前的限定词上显示出了更早的 P200 效应。在 PictureMT 中，两组都在不透明名词之前的限定词上显示出了早期 P200 效应。透明名词的限定词在西班牙语母语者中引发了约 430 毫秒的负效应，但在巴斯克语母语者中引发了约 550 毫秒的负效应。这种结果模式支持了一种“回溯假设”，根据该假设，神经认知系统通过中间（亚词汇和词汇）语言表示来导航，这些表示来自之前的处理过程，以评估对目标词汇项的语言期望进行更新的必要性。
