Hemispheric processing of word pairs in bilinguals and monolinguals
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Grant: IRB
Erika Lucas
College:
The College of Health Professions and Human Services
Major:
Speech-Language Pathology
Faculty Research Advisor(s):
Iyad Ghanim
Abstract:
The present study investigates semantic (meaning-related) processing in English monolinguals and highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals. Previous research shows that monolinguals use semantic information to help processing, as evidenced by faster responses to related words compared to unrelated words. Bilinguals, however, seem to not benefit from related words, which points to a more limited ability to use semantic context as compared to monolinguals. Additionally, there is prior research to support that each hemisphere of the brain performs a different task in sentence processing. Therefore, in this study, we investigated how different speakers processed related and unrelated words presented very quickly (50-54 ms) to the left and right cerebral hemisphere. Participants completed a divided visual field (DVF) semantic priming task in which a target word was displayed 2.8º offset from center after a prime was shown. After viewing a prime word which flashed on screen, participants saw a related or unrelated target word followed by two words. Participants were asked to identify which word was related to the target: a faster response time to complete this task indicated that the semantic relationship between the words facilitated processing. Preliminary results indicate that bilinguals are indeed slower than monolinguals at semantic processing with a greater effect occurring in the left hemisphere. This supports prior research which indicates that the left hemisphere prioritizes the processing of close semantic associates.