The Role of Orthotactics in Language Switching: An ERP Investigation Using Masked Language Priming

Abstract

It is commonly accepted that bilinguals access lexical representations from their two languages during language comprehension, even when they operate in a single language context. Language detection mechanisms are, thus, hypothesized to operate after the stage of lexical access during visual word recognition. However, recent studies showed reduced cross-language activation when sub-lexical properties of words are specific to one of the bilingual’s two languages, hinting at the fact that language selection may start before the stage of lexical access. Here, we tested highly fluent Spanish–Basque and Spanish–English bilinguals in a masked language priming paradigm in which first language (L1) target words are primed by unconsciously perceived L1 or second language (L2) words. Critically, L2 primes were either orthotactically legal or illegal in L1. Results showed automatic language detection effects only for orthotactically marked L2 primes and within the timeframe of the N250, an index of sub-lexical-to-lexical integration. Marked L2 primes also affected the processing of L1 targets at the stage of conceptual processing, but only in bilinguals whose languages are transparent. We conclude that automatic and unconscious language detection mechanisms can operate at sub-lexical levels of processing. In the absence of sub-lexical language cues, unconsciously perceived primes in the irrelevant language might not automatically trigger post-lexical language identification, thereby resulting in the lack of observable language switching effects.

The Effect of the Non-task Language When Trilingual People Use Two Languages in a Language Switching Experiment

“…The non-selective assumption is also based on the orthographic similarity between the input word and lexical candidates from both languages. However, it has already been confirmed that language-specific/marked orthographic features can speed up language attribution by reducing the number of candidates from the non-target language (van Kesteren et al, 2012;Casaponsa et al, 2019). More specifically, in Dijkstra and van Heuven (2002), it is posited that language-specific access is possible with language pairs that do not share orthography at all (e.g., Chinese and English).…”

“…Specially, we examined the effect of the non-task language, the language that is not explicitly activated for the task purpose, on a task performance involving the other two languages in a language switching experiment. By doing so, we have attempted to incorporate the processing of the non-task language and the role of orthography specificity in the existing models of bilingual word recognition, i.e., BIA+ (Dijkstra and van Heuven, 2002) and its modification BIA + s Casaponsa et al, 2019).…”

“…However, these two models do not accommodate well the sub-lexical information, such as orthographical-specific (marked) features, which are shown to be a significant factor in visual word recognition (Grainger and Beauvillain, 1987;Thomas and Allport, 2000;Orfanidou and Sumner, 2005;Casaponsa and Duñabeitia, 2016). Some subsequent modifications of the models have been proposed, such as the BIA + extended model (BIA + d, van Kesteren et al, 2012), which adds a pre-lexical processing stage of language-specific feature-level information to speed up language attribution, and the BIA + s model (Casaponsa et al, 2019), which adds separate orthographic and phonological sublexical language nodes to account for language-selective effects emerging within an integrated lexicon.…”

Changes in the Sensitivity to Language-Specific Orthographic Patterns With Age

“…The target word only competes with words within the language that have similar letter sequences, and this accelerates the decision on language attribution. This demonstrates that the orthographic (sub-lexical) language node is accessed before the lexical language node (see the BIA + s model proposed by Casaponsa et al, 2020).…”

“…In a similar line, it should be noted that Basque and Spanish are languages with a shallow orthography, and it would be important to explore whether the same developmental effects also hold in languages with a deep (opaque) orthography, such as French or English. Previous research with skilled readers has already shown that combinations of languages with a deep orthography (e.g., French-English bilinguals) or combinations of languages with deep and shallow orthographies (e.g., Spanish-English bilinguals) is also influenced by the sensitivity to orthotactic cues (e.g., Vaid and Frenck-Mestre, 2002;Van Kesteren et al, 2012;Oganian et al, 2015;Casaponsa et al, 2020). Hence, in light of all the preceding evidence, we predict a similar pattern for the development of sensitivity to orthotactic cues in bilinguals who can read languages with different degrees of transparency in their orthographies, even though future studies will have to confirm whether this is indeed the case.…”