In a new paper appearing in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Jeonghwa Cho (Michigan PhD 2024) demonstrates evidence for shared morphosyntactic representations across languages in multilinguals, but these representations are modulated by language dominance. One key innovation of this study is a focus on prefixes, unlike the majority of previous studies that focus on shared (or separate) aspects of argument structure across languages. Across four experiments, Jeonghwa finds that cognate prefixes between English and Spanish speed up reaction times in a lexical decision experiment to a degree that can be disentangled from both orthographic and semantic effects. But, this effect is asymmetrical: priming is observed from L1 to L2 but not from L2 to L1.
Cho, J. & Brennan, J.R. (2025). Prefix priming within and across languages in early and late bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Abstract
Diverse evidence supports the theory that bilingual language users have language-invariant representations of concepts and grammatical forms such as argument structure. Here we extend that work to test the representation of morphosyntactic features and lexical concepts in typologically different languages. Specifically, we deploy machine learning techniques with EEG data collected from eighteen Korean-English bilinguals while they read singular and plural nouns and present and past tense verbs in English and Korean. Whereas event-related potentials (ERPs) analyses show limited sensitivity to discriminate lexical, number, and tense information, neural decoding revealed robust within-language classification of lexical and morphosyntactic information in both languages. In contrast, between-languages decoding was possible only for number information; decoding of lexical items and tense did not generalize between the two languages, even when accounting for temporal differences. These results indicate stable within-language EEG representations for lexical items and morphosyntactic features but suggest that only the number feature show evidence for shared EEG response patterns between the two languages studied.