Schedule of Events | Symposia

How bilingual experience shapes anticipatory brain activity and prediction in language processing

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Elaina Jahanfard^1,2 (esjahanfard@ucdavis.edu), Katherine Sendek^1,2, Tamara Y. Swaab^1,2; ¹UC Davis Psychology Department, ²UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain

Bilingualism is common throughout the world. However, its effects on language prediction are not well understood, compared to monolinguals. It has been demonstrated that monolinguals predict upcoming words in highly constraining language contexts, thereby facilitating processing. The effects of prediction in bilinguals’ second language (L2) have yielded mixed findings. In the present study we examined L2 prediction in 30 highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals and 30 English monolinguals using a word-pair prediction paradigm. Participants were asked to predict the second word of each pair, which had a 50% forward association, and indicate if the word they predicted matched the target word. A typical N400 effect of successful prediction was found in both groups. Additional analyses were done to derive a measure of aperiodic activity from the EEG. Aperiodic activity is inversely proportional to the frequency of oscillatory activity. A steeper slope in aperiodic activity indicates greater oscillatory power in the lower frequency bands, which is suggestive of higher processing demands and has been associated with increased N400 effects of prediction success in our lab. Bilinguals showed a steeper aperiodic slope compared to monolinguals (t(132)=-3.33, p=.002), suggesting increased anticipatory predictive activity. A mixed-effects model analyzing the size of the N400 effect indicated an interaction between bilingual status and aperiodic slope (t(1125)=-2.62, p=.009), though the effect of slope in each group did not reach significance during post hoc tests. These findings suggest that anticipation and prediction in language is impacted by bilingual experience, more than just target language experience.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic