Abstracts Psychology

Event related potentials reflect the early stages of second language lexical acquisition

by Judith L. McLaughlin

This study examined changes in brain activity that were associated with the earliest stages of word learning during foreign language acquisition in adulthood. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured while participants read or listened to English and French words and nonwords presented in a visual or auditory lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, after approximately two weeks of classroom French instruction, learners' ERPs discriminated between visually presented French words and nonwords. This discriminative capacity developed before learners could consciously discriminate between French words and nonwords and before they learned the meanings of the words. Electrophysiological manifestations of lexical semantic representations emerged by the middle of the instructional period (after about 15 weeks of language instruction). With increasing instruction, the brain responses to these stimuli increasingly approximated a native-like response. In Experiment 2, learners' ERPs discriminated between auditorily presented French words and nonwords by approximately 15 weeks of language instruction. ERP manifestations of word meaning also emerged by the middle of the instructional period.