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Abstract:
Previous studies of the effects of stimulus repetition on
event-related potentials (ERPs) have consistently shown differences
in ERPs between unrepeated and repeated stimuli suggesting that
subjects encode and/or retrieve these stimuli differently.
Furthermore, this ERP repetition effect typically consists of both
an early (N400 attenuation) and later (late positive component or
LPC enhancement) phase. In this study we examined ERP repetition
effects in a bilingual priming paradigm in which stimulus
repetition was incidental to the task employed. A novice and
advanced group of subjects studying Spanish as a second language
participated in a semantic categorization task in which English and
Spanish words were visually presented in a constant stream (400 ms
duration and 2300 ms ISI). Immediate repetitions within this stream
occurred either within a language (e.g., dog-dog or perro-perro) or
between languages (e.g., dog-perro or perro-dog). Both novice and
advanced groups revealed English/English and Spanish/Spanish
repetition effects (i.e., attenuation in the N400) as early as 250
ms post stimulus, although the Spanish effect extended somewhat
later in time. Both novice and advanced groups also showed an early
English/Spanish and Spanish/English repetition effect. However, the
English/Spanish condition revealed an enhanced LPC that is greater
in the advanced group. These results suggest that there are
different encoding/retrieval demands on memory when reading in a
first and second language and that these demands vary depending on
language proficiency and order of presentation.
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