ERP evidence for implicit L2 word stress knowledge in listeners of a fixed-stress language

Shared Loanword Recognition in German-English Bilinguals: The Role of Metrical Phonology

The role of phonology in bilingual word recognition has focused on a phonemic level especially in the recognition of cognates. In this study, we examined differences in metrical structure to test whether first language (L1) metrical structure influences the processing of second language (L2) words. For that, we used words of Romance origin (e.g., reptile, signal), which both German and English have borrowed extensively. However, the existing metrical patterns are not identical nor are the borrowed vocabularies the same. Rather, those identical words differ systematically in their foot structure. We conducted a cross-modal form fragment priming EEG experiment (auditory-visual) with German native speakers who were highly proficient in English. Both behavioral and ERP results showed an effect of the native phonology and the loan status, that is, whether the loan exists only in the speaker's L2 or is shared across languages. Priming effects (RTs) were largest for nonshared loanwords indicating some interference from German (L1). This was also evident in a reduced N400 but only if the metrical structure aligned with German patterns for Germanic words, that is, two light syllables as in pigeon. If the words exist in both languages, metrical structure also mattered shown by the modulation of different ERP components across conditions. Overall, our study indicates that metrical phonology plays a role in loanword processing. Our data show that the more similar a word is in terms of its metrical phonology across L1 and L2, the more effortful the processing of a word within a priming paradigm indicating interference from the L1 phonology.

Phonemic Training Modulates Early Speech Processing in Pre-reading Children

Phonemic awareness and rudimentary grapheme knowledge concurrently develop in pre-school age. In a training study, we tried to disentangle the role of both precursor functions of reading for spoken word recognition. Two groups of children exercised with phonemic materials, but only one of both groups learnt corresponding letters to trained phonemes. A control group exercised finger-number associations (non-linguistic training). After the training, we tested how sensitive children were to prime-target variation in word onset priming. A group of young adults took part in the same experiment to provide data from experienced readers. While decision latencies to the targets suggested fine-grained spoken word processing in all groups, event-related potentials (ERPs) indicated that both phonemic training groups processed phonemic variation in more detail than the non-linguistic training group and young adults at early stages of speech processing. Our results indicate temporal plasticity of implicit speech processing in pre-school age as a function of explicit phonemic training.

Near native-like stress pattern perception in English-French bilinguals as indexed by the mismatch negativity

We examined lexical stress processing in English-French bilinguals. Auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) responses were recorded in response to English and French pseudowords, whose primary stress occurred either on a language-consistent "usual" or language-inconsistent "unusual" syllable. In most conditions, the pseudowords elicited two consecutive MMNs, and somewhat surprisingly, these MMNs were not systematically modulated by bilingual experience. This suggests that it is possible to achieve native-like pre-attentive processing of lexical stress, even in a language that one has not learned since birth.

Electrophysiological Differentiation of the Effects of Stress and Accent on Lexical Integration in Highly Fluent Bilinguals

Individuals who acquire a second language (L2) after infancy often retain features of their native language (L1) accent. Cross-language priming studies have shown negative effects of L1 accent on L2 comprehension, but the role of specific speech features, such as lexical stress, is mostly unknown. Here, we investigate whether lexical stress and accent differently modulate semantic processing and cross-language lexical activation in Welsh–English bilinguals, given that English and Welsh differ substantially in terms of stress realisation. In an L2 cross-modal priming paradigm, we manipulated the stress pattern and accent of spoken primes, whilst participants made semantic relatedness judgments on visual word targets. Event-related brain potentials revealed a main effect of stress on target integration, such that stimuli with stress patterns compatible with either the L1 or L2 required less processing effort than stimuli with stress incompatible with both Welsh and English. An independent cross-language phonological overlap manipulation revealed an interaction between accent and L1 access. Interestingly, although it increased processing effort, incorrect stress did not significantly modulate semantic priming effects or covert access to L1 phonological representations. Our results are consistent with the concept of language-specific stress templates, and suggest that accent and lexical stress affect speech comprehension mechanisms differentially.