Current trends in electrophysiological research on bilingual language processing

Abstract

Recently, much psycholinguistic research has been devoted to examining cognitive mechanisms engaged in language processing in the bilingual context, as this might provide in-depth insights into how different languages interact with one another as well as how and to what extent language competence affects cognition. At the same time, along with such a growing interest in studying bilingual populations, psycholinguistics as a discipline has been rapidly developing owing to the more and more widespread use of physiological research methods. Particularly, electroencephalography (EEG) has received much scholarly attention, as it can elucidate the exact time course of language processing. The present contribution explores current trends in EEG research on bilingual language processing and discusses how event-related potential (ERP) studies and their findings have been extended from the monolingual to the bilingual context. To this end, the paper discusses selected ERP experiments into language co-activation across different modalities, bilingual executive control, electrophysiological correlates of new meaning construction, neural changes accompanying foreign language learning, and the automaticity of emotional responding in bilingual speakers.