Access to numerical magnitude depends on the language that a bilingual activates

Salillas, E. 1 & Carreiras, M. 1, 2, 3

1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Donostia. Spain.
2 Ikerbasque. Basque Foundation for Science
3 Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea - Universidad del País Vasco

The multiple codes available for a bilingual can have an impact on other cognitive domains. In a previous study (Salillas and Wicha, under review in Psy-Science) we reported striking differences in memory networks for arithmetic facts, determined by the language in which math was initially learned (language of learning arithmetic –LolA). Here we aim to detect possible differences in the access to core number representations determined by the language in use. We used the redundancy gain design (Campbell et al. 2008, 2009) while registering electrophysiological response. Participants had to name two successive digits in the context of a subsequent number comparison task or a multiplication task. Naming times were faster and distance effect was bigger within a comparison context: the joint activation of the semantic route and the digit-to-word direct route in the context of comparison entails a redundancy gain. We applied this paradigm to balanced Basque-Spanish bilinguals and used it to measure possible differential activations of the semantic route, depending on the language used for naming. Remarkably, results show that a) P2P component (Cao et al., 2010; Libertus et al., 2010) had a significantly modulation by distance only when LolA was used for naming; b) distance effects for LolA in the context of comparison were larger. Distance effects appeared later, between350 to 450 ms., for both languages and again were modulated by the activation of the two routes. Our results show clearly that activation of the semantic route is much more effective when the used language is LolA, and suggest notation dependency processing of numerical magnitude in bilinguals. More generally, shows that the language in which math was learned implies more than simply differential representations, but the establishment of differential routes of access to number meaning.