The representation and processing of identical cognates by late 通过晚与相同的同源词处理的表示.docxVIP

RT and N400 effects for identical cognates  PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 52 The representation and processing of identical cognates by late bilinguals: RT and N400 effects David Peeters1 Ton Dijkstra2, Jonathan Grainger3 1 Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands 2Donders Centre for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands 3Aix-Marseille University and CNRS, France Across the languages of a bilingual, words can have the same orthographic form and a similar meaning. How such words, called identical cognates, are processed and represented in the bilingual brain is not well understood. We collected reaction time data and event-related potentials in response to identical cognates and control words while late French-English bilinguals performed a lexical decision task in their L2, English. The behavioral data showed facilitatory effects of cognate status and English frequency. Further analysis on the identical cognates revealed effects of both English and French frequency. Cognates with a low English frequency showed a larger facilitation effect than cognates with a high English frequency. The electrophysiological data showed N400 effects of cognate status and both English and French frequency of the identical cognates. All results are discussed in terms of the processing of identical cognates and the way they are represented in the bilingual brain. Key words: bilingual word recognition, cognate representation, word frequency, N400 effects Corresponding author: David Peeters, dgtpeeters@ Introduction When reading in a second language, it is sometimes hard to relate a foreign word form to its meaning. However, words that have a similar form and meaning across languages, so-called cognates, generally facilitate foreign reading. For instance, a native speaker of English reading a French book will understand the words FILM, TAXI and RESTAURANT easily because they exist in both French and English. The processing of such words, which are called identical