Aparicio, X. 1, 2 , Grainger, J. 2 , Midgley, K. J. 3 , Holcomb, P. J. 2, 3 & Lavaur, J. 1
1 University Montpellier Sud de France, France
2 University Aix-Marseille, France
3 Tufts University, Medford, USA
Event-related potentials were recorded during the visual presentation of words in the three languages of French-English-Spanish trilinguals (native French participants who were university learners of English, L2, and Spanish, L3). Participants monitored a mixed list of words in the three languages for occasional probe words from one semantic category (animals). Words in L1 generated earlier N400 peak amplitudes than both L2 and L3 words, that themselves did not differ on this measure. This effect of peak latency is thought to reflect qualitatively different lexical processing associated with an early-acquired language (L1) and those that are acquired late. However, L3 words generated more negatively going waveforms than L2 words in both an earlier and a later time window. The early L2-L3 difference seen in P2 amplitudes (at around 200 ms post-stimulus onset) is thought to reflect the differing level of orthographic overlap between English (L2) and Spanish (L3) words on the one hand, and words in French (L1) on the other. The later L2-L3 difference was seen in peak N400 amplitudes and was found to correlate with participants’ self-rated proficiency in L2 and L3. This difference in N400 amplitude therefore likely reflects quantitative differences in the ease with which lexical forms are mapped onto meaning in non-native languages.