Casaponsa, A. 1 , Carreiras, M. 1, 2, 3 & Duñabeitia, J. A. 1
1 Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language.
2 Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science
3 University of the Basque Country EHU/UPV
How do bilinguals detect the language of a word that they are reading? In the current study we investigated the extent to which language detection is modulated by the sub-lexical orthographic regularities of the words. Bilinguals completed a reading task in which Spanish targets were briefly preceded by unrelated words either in Spanish or Basque (masked language switch priming paradigm) while their electrophysiological activity was recorded. The bigrams of the Basque words were manipulated as a function of their legality in Spanish (i.e., legal vs. illegal bigrams). Results showed switch cost effects in the N250 and N400 components only for Spanish words preceded by Basque primes containing Spanish-illegal bigrams, and a clear lack of such effects for Basque words whose bigrams did also exist in Spanish. A replication of this experiment with Spanish monolinguals with no knowledge of Basque showed a markedly different pattern, with significant switch cost effects in the N250 and N400 components for Spanish words preceded by Basque primes containing Spanish-illegal and Spanish-legal bigram combinations. These results demonstrate that bilingual readers process orthographically marked words differently from orthographically unmarked words and that language detection mechanisms in bilinguals are based on statistical orthographic regularities. In light of these results, we conclude that bilinguals process language-unmarked words faster than language-marked words.