Magyar–angol kétnyelvűek vizuális szófelismerési mintái

Abstract

As part of a larger study, this paper investigates the brain event-related potential components (EKPs) of written word recognition in case of bilinguals. It illustrates what happens in the brain at the orthographic, phonological and semantic levels of word recognition with lexical decision test results. The research questions address the temporal aspects of the written versions of the two languages in the processes of visual word recognition and the role of phonology in word recognition. We tested 23 Hungarian-English bilinguals, all of whom have a C1 level of English and use English daily at work or school. Results show different processing patterns in the identification of meaningful words and meaningless letters in the parietal and occipital lobes in the early (150-200 ms) and late (200-250 ms) stages of the N170 EKP component, which is the initial stage of word recognition. This means that the decision on word similarity occurs around 200-250 ms after stimulus presentation, when orthographic-phonological processing takes place. At this stage, however, participants can only decide whether the sequence of letters on the screen is a word or not. The linguistic classification of the word is only done later.