Behavioral and Electrophysiological Correlates of Lexical Semantic Activation in High and Low Proficient Bilinguals

Abstract

The study was carried out to determine the behavioral and electrophysiological correlates of lexical semantic activation in low and high-proficient bilinguals. A total of 38 Kannada-English Bilinguals were recruited for the study after seeking their informed consent. The participants were administered the behavioral and electrophysiological task using translational judgment. The participant's task was to judge if the words presented in L1-L2 or L2-L1 were related to each other. The prime and target were presented in translation equivalent and non-equivalent conditions in L1-L2 and L2-L1. The reaction time and accuracy scores on behavioral tasks showed no significant difference. At the same time, there was a significant difference between low and high-proficient bilinguals on translation equivalents in the electrophysiological (N400) task. To conclude, the difference in lexical semantic activation among high and low-proficient bilinguals was evident through electrophysiological measures indicating a difference in neural representations among the two groups.