von Holzen, K. & Mani, N.
University of Göttingen, Germany
Phonological priming effects operate across a bilinguals’ two languages - words in one language can prime words in the other language (Van Wijnendaele and Brysbaert; 2002). These results point to the interconnectivity of the bilingual’s two lexicons. However, these results are based on studies which present subjects with orthographic or auditory stimuli from both languages (Phillips et al., 2006). It is unsurprising that words in both languages are activated. In contrast Wu and Thierry (2010) tested participants in only their second language, and found unconscious priming effects due to word relationships to the participants’ first language. The current study tests participants in their dominant language to demonstrate unconscious priming effects due to word relationships in the participants’ second language. Subjects were presented with images of name-known objects as primes followed by auditorily presented target words which were phonologically related, unrelated or identical to the label for the prime image. We studied adult German-English bilinguals and children in a German-English bilingual program. ERPs to targets were measured to determine differences in activation between the different conditions. In the rhyming conditions, phonological similarity between prime images and target labels was manipulated within (i.e. German prime, German target) and across (i.e. English prime, German target) languages. Importantly, since the prime is an image, and the targets were only German words for adults and English words for children, this study presents subjects with stimuli from only one language. Nevertheless, adult N400-like amplitude revealed no differences in activation from prime image-target labels that were related within and across languages. However, the N400-like amplitude of children showed a differentiation of the rhyming conditions, although both conditions differed from the unrelated condition. This provides strong evidence of interconnectivity of a bilingual’s two lexicons as it develops, despite presenting subjects with stimuli from only one language.