Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

How individual differences influence code-switched sentence comprehension: An ERP study

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

Ingrid Chuang¹, Janet G. van Hell¹; ¹The Pennsylvania State University

Bilinguals regularly use two languages within a single utterance. This code-switching provides a valuable testbed for examining cross-language interaction and cognitive control in bilingual comprehension. Using auditory ERPs, Fernandez et al. (2019) found that dominant-to-weaker language switches elicited N400 (associated with semantic access) and LPC (associated with sentence-level reanalysis) effects, whereas weaker-to-dominant switches elicited only an N400 effect. While these and related findings highlight different neural responses for the two code-switching directions at the group level (for review, see Van Hell, 2022), the role of individual variability remains underexplored. This study investigates how individual differences in cognitive and linguistic skills influence ERP responses associated with auditory code-switching comprehension. Native Spanish speakers proficient in English (about half had become English-dominant at the time of testing) listened to sentences in four conditions: entirely in English, English-to-Spanish switches, entirely in Spanish, and Spanish-to-English switches. Measures of language proficiency, cognitive control, and familial sinistrality were collected. The ERP results replicated Fernandez et al. (2019)’s findings, with dominant-to-weaker language switches eliciting both N400 and LPC effects, and weaker-to-dominant switches eliciting only an N400 effect. Importantly, higher L1 (Spanish) proficiency was associated with reduced N400 effects during weaker-to-dominant switches, whereas higher L2 (English) proficiency was associated with reduced LPC effects in dominant-to-weaker switches. Cognitive control abilities did not impact code-switch related ERP effects. These findings will be explained in terms of the importance of individual differences in shaping bilingual language processing, offering new insights into the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying code-switching comprehension.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other