ERP Research

The goal of this research was to use codeswitching, a unique bilingual behavior, as a tool to understand the relationship language production and comprehension. We tested hypothesis that individuals become sensitive to distributional patterns their linguistic input by comparing the processing of common and rare codeswitches in bilinguals who either regularly codeswitched (i.e., codeswitchers) or not (non-codeswitchers). We provide electrophysiological evidence for differential sensitivity to the processing of codeswitched sentences as a function of bilingual experience. Specifically, while rarely-observed codeswitches were more difficult to process for codeswitching bilinguals, commonly-observed codeswitches did not result in switching costs. Non-codeswitchers, on the other hand, processed both common and rare codeswitches with similar difficulty, suggesting that had little exposure to codeswitching. In a subsequent production experiment, we assessed participants’ codeswitching behavior, confirming that a) codeswitchers codeswitched more often than non-codeswitchers and b) codeswitching patterns that were more frequent were also more easily processed in the first experiment. Together, the results illustrate how the comprehension system becomes attuned to variation in the input, and demonstrate that switching costs depend on the type of switch and language experience.

Collaborators: Giuli Dussias (Penn State University)

Studies of Spanish grammatical gender have shown that native Spanish speakers exploit gender cues in determiners to facilitate speech processing and are sensitive to gender mismatches. However, past research has not considered attested distributional asymmetries between masculine and feminine gender, and instead has treated grammatical gender as a uniform construct, collapsing performance on trials with one or the other gender into a single analysis. We use event-related potentials to investigate whether masculine and feminine grammatical gender elicit qualitatively different brain responses. We demonstrate that even when processing features of language that belong to the same "natural class", native speakers can exhibit patterns of brain activity finely attuned to distributional patterns of language use. The inherent variability in native speaker processing is, therefore, an important factor when explaining purported deviations from the "native norm" reported in other types of populations.

Collaborators: Giuli Dussias (Penn State University), Michelle Bruni (University of California, Riverside), & Teresa Bajo (University of Granada)

Publications:

Beatty-Martínez, A. L., Bruni, M. R., Bajo, M. T., & Dussias, P. E. (2020). Brain potentials reveal differential processing of masculine and feminine grammatical gender in native Spanish speakers. Psychophysiology, 00:e13737. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13737

Beatty-Martínez, A. L. (2019). Revisiting Spanish grammatical gender in monolingual and bilingual speakers: Evidence from event-related potentials and eye-movements. Ph.D. dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA.

Beatty-Martínez, A. L. & Dussias, P. E., (2019). Revisiting Masculine and Feminine Grammatical Gender in Spanish: Linguistic, Psycholinguistic, and Neurolinguistic Evidence. In S. Macini, S. Caffarra, & A. Nevins (Eds.)., Featural Relations in the Brain: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives on Grammatical Agreement [Special Issue]. Frontiers in Psychology, 10:751. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00751

Beatty-Martínez, A.L. & Dussias, P.E. (2017). Bilingual experience shapes language processing: Evidence from codeswitching, Journal of Memory and Language 95, 173-189.