Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 2014, Vol. 40, No. 5, 1461-1469

© 2014 American Psychological Association 0278-7393/14/$ 12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0036756

RESEARCH REPORT

Can Bilinguals See It Coming? Word Anticipation in L2 Sentence Reading Alice Foucart

Clara D. Martin

Center for Brain and Cognition, University Pompeu Fabra

Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, and Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain

Eva M. Moreno

Albert Costa

Institute Plundisciplinar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Center for Brain and Cognition, University Pompeu Fabra, and Institucio Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avanfats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain

Why is it more difficult to comprehend a 2nd (L2) than a 1st language (LI)? In the present article we investigate whether difficulties during L2 sentence comprehension come from differences in the way LI and L2 speakers anticipate upcoming words. We recorded the brain activity (event-related potentials) of Spanish monolingual, French-Spanish late bilinguals, and Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals while reading sentences in Spanish. We manipulated the ending of highly constrained sentences so that the critical noun was either expected or not. The expected and unexpected nouns were of different gender so that we could observe potential anticipation effects already on the article. In line with previous studies, a modulation of the N400 effect was observed on the article and the noun, followed by an anterior positivity on the noun. Importantly, this pattern was found in all 3 groups, suggesting that, at least when their 2 languages are closely related, bilinguals are able to anticipate upcoming words in a similar manner as monolinguals. Keywords: word anticipation, semantic processing, bilingualism, grammatical gender

From general slow processing to reduced vocabulary, several factors may contribute to individuals’ difficulties comprehend­ ing a second language (L2). For example, during everyday conversation, L2 comprehenders may find it difficult to under­ stand a sentence if they miss one word; this may be because, unlike native comprehenders, who are able to use the various cues (e.g., semantic and syntactic) provided by the sentence

context to anticipate the words that are likely to appear (antic­ ipation processing), L2 comprehenders may tend to process a word once it turns up (integration processing). The aim of the present research is to understand these difficulties by exploring people’s ability to anticipate words during language compre­ hension in an L2. Anticipation processes are fundamental in sentence comprehension as they allow for rapid understanding and fluent conversation (Pickering & Garrod, 2007). Indeed, native comprehenders incrementally process the sentence con­ text, which allows them to anticipate upcoming words, conse­ quently facilitating their integration once they appear. Antici­ pation processes, for example, allow comprehenders to predict what their interlocutor is about to say or even to finish their sentence. Interestingly, comprehenders do not seem to antici­ pate only content words, such as nouns, but also their features (e.g., gender, phonology) to realize agreement as the sentence unfolds. For example, Wicha, Moreno, and Kutas (2004) pre­ sented high-constraint Spanish sentences to examine whether grammatical gender cues are used during sentence comprehen­ sion. The sentences could either end with an expected or an unexpected noun. Crucially, the gender of the expected noun was different from that of the unexpected noun (e.g., Little Red Riding Hood carried the food for her grandmother in a[fem] basket [fem]/a[masc] hamper [masc]). A larger positivity was observed when the article did not match with the gender of the expected noun than when it did. The authors concluded that

This article was published Online First May 5, 2014. Alice Foucart, Center for Brain and Cognition, University Pompeu Fabra; Clara D. Martin, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, and Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain; Eva M. Moreno, Institute Pluridisciplinar, Univer­ sidad Complutense de Madrid; Albert Costa, Center for Brain and Cogni­ tion, University Pompeu Fabra, and Institucid Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avanjats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain. This work was supported by grants from the Spanish government (PSI2008-01191, PSI2011-23033, Consolider Ingenio 2010 CSD200700012) and the Catalan government (Consolidado SGR 2009-1521). Clara D. Martin was supported by the Spanish government (Grant luan de la Cierva) and is now supported by the Basque Foundation for Science (Ikerbasque) and the BCBL institution. Alice Foucart is supported by the Catalan government (Grant Beatriu de Pinos). Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Alice Fou­ cart, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Department of Technology (Room 55116), Roc Boronat, 138, 08018, Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: [email protected] 1461

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FOUCART, MARTIN, MORENO, AND COSTA

readers anticipate both the noun and its gender and that gender is used in real time to preserve agreement and build up sentence meaning. Similar conclusions have been drawn from studies that manipulated other types of gender agreement (e.g., adjective-noun agreement; Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005) or features (e.g., phonology; DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005; Martin et al., 2013).1 In this article we embrace the theoretical framework of sentence processing according to which comprehenders take an active role, predicting linguistic information based on sentence context (e.g., DeLong et al., 2005; Neely, 1977). A crucial implicit aspect of this framework is that linguistic processing should be fast and efficient enough to allow anticipating linguistic information before it is actually presented. Given this theoretical framework, if processing a message is difficult (e.g., when processing a message in an L2), incremental processing may be compromised, which may, in turn, reduce the possibility of anticipating upcoming linguistic informa­ tion. Put it simply, in difficult sentence processing situations, anticipation processes may not be fast enough to keep pace with the speed with which a sentence unfolds. Thus, given that L2 processing may entail a delay (Frenck-Mestre, 2002; Hahne, 2001; Weber-Fox & Neville, 1996; for reviews, see Frenck-Mestre, Sneed German, & Foucart, 2014; Moreno, Rodriguez-Fomells, & Laine, 2008), the ability to anticipate linguistic information, such as word and their features, might be reduced. The present study examines whether anticipation processes are at play during L2 sentence comprehension. This does not mean, however, that L2 processing is not sensitive to sentence context. Many studies have shown sentence context effects during L2 sentence processing using semantic violations (for reviews, see Frenck-Mestre et al., 2014; Moreno et al., 2008) or investigating the effect of context on cross-language activation effects (Altarriba, Kroll, Sholl, & Rayner, 1996; Duyck, Van Assche, Drieghe, & Hartsuiker, 2007; Libben & Titone, 2009; Van Assche, Drieghe, Duyck, Welvaert, & Hartsuiker, 2011; van Hell & de Groot, 2008; see Van Assche, Duyck, & Hartsuiker, 2012, for a review). For example, L2 comprehenders reveal easier process­ ing of the word “book” when presented in a high-constraint con­ text (“He went to the library to get a book”) than in a lowconstraint context (“He went to the shop to buy a book"). However, concluding from these results that anticipation processes are at play during L2 sentence processing is premature; indeed, these context effects might reflect integration processes rather than anticipation processes. More specifically, the advantage observed in processing “book” in a high-constraint context may reveal that the word is easily integrated within the sentence context once presented. This facilitation of integration may be due to the fact that the word “book” matches the semantic network activated by the sentence context (Kuperberg, Paczynski, & Ditman, 2011; Myers & O’Brien, 1998; Paczynski & Kuperberg, 2012). Note that this explanation, often referred as “passive resonance,” diverges from that based on active predictive processes, according to which words are anticipated as the sentence unfolds (see Lau, Holcomb, & Kuperberg, 2013, for an extensive discussion on the debate). We adopt the assumption that both anticipation and integration pro­ cesses are involved in LI sentence processing such that anticipat­ ing a word facilitates its integration once it appears. As mentioned above, L2 comprehenders are sensitive to sentence context; the interesting question is whether they rely on both anticipation and

integration processes as native comprehenders seem to do, or, since processing the sentence context incrementally is more diffi­ cult, they tend to rely mainly on integration processes. Importantly, for our purposes, anticipation processes can be isolated from integration processes, by exploring context effects on target words even before they are presented. This has been suc­ cessfully done by exploring the ERP modulations associated with determiners that match or mismatch the “predicted” noun, as in Wicha et al.’s (2004) study reported above. To our knowledge, the only study that has made use of this design to assess anticipation processes in L2 is that of Martin et al. (2013). The authors presented high constrained sentences in Eng­ lish to native speakers and Spanish-English late bilinguals and recorded their brain activity as they were reading silently. They manipulated the final noun (i.e., either expected or unexpected, vowel or consonant initial) and the preceding article (“a/an”; e.g., “The day was breezy so the boy went outside to fly a kite/an airplane”). Their results revealed a larger N400 effect for unex­ pected than for expected nouns both in LI (replicating DeLong et al.’s, 2005) and in L2. In contrast, on the article, the N400 effect was observed only in LI. Taking the N400 modulation of the article as an index of anticipation processes, the authors concluded that L2 comprehenders anticipate words to a weaker extent than LI comprehenders. However, this may be a hasty conclusion; the limitation of this study is the linguistic feature used to index anticipation processes. Indeed, Martin et al. (2013) manipulated the determiner alternation driven by the phonological properties of the noun (“a/an”). Cru­ cially, this phonological rule is not present in the first language of their participants (Spanish). Previous studies have shown that L2 syntactic processing is more difficult when LI and L2 syntactic rules differ (Foucart & Frenck-Mestre, 2011; Tokowicz & MacWhinney, 2005; for a review, see Tolentino & Tokowicz, 2011). Thus, the absence of anticipation processes might be due, to some extent, to the difficulty of realizing the phonological agreement between the noun and the determiner, rather than to a lack of semantic anticipation processes. In other words, it is possible that their participants did anticipate the noun but failed to apply the phonological agreement rule, rendering anticipation processes un­ detectable. Hence, this study left open the possibility that antici­ pation processes are functional in L2 processing. A way to further address this issue is to test the presence of anticipation processes using a linguistic feature that exists and follows the same agreement rule in LI and L2. The idea is that if L2 processing is facilitated thanks to cross-linguistic similarities, anticipation processes might be detected. This is the aim of the present study; here we investigate the presence of anticipation using articles that are gender-marked, gender agreement rules being similar in both Spanish and French. Thus, our study aims to

1 The effect provoked by unexpected words was reflected either by a negativity (DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005; Martin et al., 2013; Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2003) or by a positivity (Van Berkum, Brown, Zwisterlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005; Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2004). The origin of this difference is not dear. Shedding light on the origin of this difference is not the aim of the present article (but see Van Petten & Luka, 2012 for a review); the crucial point for our purpose is that the ERP modulation implies that comprehenders make predictions about upcoming words and their features during sentence comprehension.

WORD ANTICIPATION IN L2 SENTENCE READING

complement and extend the work of Martin et al. (2013), deter­ mining more precisely whether anticipation processes are at play during L2 sentence comprehension. To this aim, we recorded the brain activity of Spanish native speakers and French-Spanish late bilinguals while reading sen­ tences in Spanish. Following Wicha et al.’s (2004) design, we manipulated the expectancy and the gender of the noun and, consequently, of the preceding article. In addition, we included a group of Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals who performed the task in their L I (Spanish). This group was included as a second control group to explore if the bilingual nature of the participants may have an impact on the anticipation processes. One could argue that part of the difficulties of L2 comprehension to anticipate words stems, to some extent, from the parallel activation of the two languages during sentence comprehension and the potential com­ petition that this may lead to (Van Assche, Duyck, Hartsuiker, & Diependaele, 2009; see also Van Assche et al., 2012, for a review). Although, we do not know how far this interaction may affect anticipation processes, at the very least the data from this group will also afford assessing the reliability of the monolingual data. The predictions of the present study are straightforward. If anticipation processes are at play during L2 sentence comprehen­ sion, we should observe similar patterns of ERP modulations associated with expected and unexpected items for LI and L2 groups. This is especially important in the case of articles, where anticipation processes will be indexed by a modulation of the N400. Additionally, we also expect a modulation of the N400 component for expected and unexpected nouns, followed by an anterior positivity (DeLong, Groppe, Urbach, & Kutas, 2012; Federmeier, Wlotko, De Ochoa-Dewald, & Kutas, 2007; Van Petten & Luka, 2012). In contrast, if, as suggested by Martin et al.’s (2013) results, L2 comprehenders do not anticipate words to the same extent as LI comprehenders, we should replicate their observations, finding a modulation of the N400 component on the article only in LI, suggesting that L2 comprehenders tend to rely more on integration processes than on anticipation processes dur­ ing sentence processing.

Method Participants Eighteen Spanish native speakers, 18 Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals and 18 French-Spanish late bilinguals took part in the

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experiment (details are reported in Table 1). French speakers had learned Spanish at school and were university students in Spain. They were asked to assess their level of Spanish proficiency (from 1 = very poor to 7 = excellent) for written/oral comprehension/ production. They completed a language test (B2 level of the Common European Framework) that they were required to pass to participate (15.8 out of 20, SD: 2.92). Spanish-Catalan early bi­ linguals had been speaking the two languages on a daily basis from birth. All participants signed a consent form before the experiment after having received oral and written information about the pro­ cedure.

Materials and Design Fifty-two highly constraint sentence frames were created and each was completed by an expected noun phrase (NP) and an unexpected NP, resulting in 104 experimental sentences (see Table 2). All sentences were semantically correct. The expected and unexpected NPs always differed in gender (e.g., la playa [fem] vs. el parque [masc]; the beach vs. the park), but no gender violations were included. Critical nouns were selected from text books and websites of Spanish as a foreign language to ensure they were known by B2 level L2 speakers. Nouns were selected in Buscar Palabras (Davis & Perea, 2005) with the constraints that they shared the same gender in Spanish and French, since gender agreement processing is facilitated when LI and L2 gender overlap (Foucart & Frenck-Mestre, 2011; Sabourin & Stowe, 2008), and started with a consonant to avoid any phonological bias. Expected and unexpected critical words were balanced in frequency, ex­ pected: 50.07 per million SD: 7.54 range; unexpected: 42.49, SD: 7.5 range; t(52) = 0.85, p = .40, and length (mean 6 letters, range 4 -9 , for both conditions). Expected nouns contained 24 masculine norms and 28 feminine nouns. In addition, given that cognates are more easily available to bilinguals than noncognates (Costa, Caramazza, & Sebastian-Galles, 2000), they might be anticipated more rapidly than noncognates; hence, anticipation effects might be facilitated when the expected noun is a cognate (see Van Assche et al., 2011, 2012 for more details). Hence, half of the expected nouns were cognates across Spanish and French; they were balanced in frequency, cognates: 46.72, SD: 10; noncognates: 50.18, SD: 10.66; r(26) = 0.49, p = .62, length (mean 6 letters, range 4 -9 for both conditions) and gender (masculine: 12; feminine: 14, for both conditions). The large lexical overlapping between Spanish, French, and Catalan rendered very difficult to control for cognates

Table 1 Participants’ Details French-Spanish Variable

N

Gender (no. women) Age (years) Stait age of Spanish instruction Immersion duration (months) in Spain Self-rating Written comprehension Written production Oral production Oral comprehension

11

M

SD

Range

Spanish N

M

Spanish-Catalan

SD Range N

17 22 1.57 20-26 14 4.5 8-22 19.2 20.70 9^12 5.6 5.1 5.4 5.8

0.85 1.7 0.94 0.80

22 3.6

19-32

M

SD Range

12 22 3.2

19-29

FOUCART, MARTIN, MORENO, AND COSTA

1464 Table 2 Example o f Sentences Condition Expected

Example El pirata tenia el mapa secreto, pero nunca encontrd el tesoro [masc] que buscaba.

[The pirate had the secret map, but he never found the treasure he was looking for.] Unexpected

El pirata tenia el mapa secreto, pero nunca encontrd la gruta [fem] que buscaba.

[The pirate had the secret map, but he never found the cave he was looking for.]

across the three languages; however, the majority of the (non)cognate words we controlled across Spanish and French fell within the same category across Spanish and Catalan (92% of the cognates and 69% of the noncognates). The critical noun was never placed at the final position to avoid wrap-up effects. The mean cloze probability of expected sentences was assessed by native (N = 12) and nonnative speakers (N = 12) of Spanish who did not take part in the experiment. They were asked to complete sentence frames with the first word that came to their mind. Sentence contexts were provided up to the word before the article; hence, participants were free to complete the sentence frame with a noun of either gender. Mean cloze probability for expected and unexpected words was .82 (SD: .18) and .02 (SD: .04), respectively, for monolinguals and .81 (SD: .19) and .04 (SD: .09) for bilinguals with no significant difference between the groups (p = .42 and p = .12). The 104 sentences were divided into two lists containing an equal number of expected and unexpected trials. Lists were balanced for number of cognates, noun gender, word frequency and length. Each sentence appeared only once in each list either in the expected or unexpected condition.

Procedure Participants were presented with one of the two lists using E-Prime (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, & Provost, 1993). Trials were automatically randomized for each participant. One quarter of the trials was followed by a yes-no comprehension question in order to ensure participants paid attention (over 96% of correct answers in all three groups). Participants were presented with the first part of the sentence displayed as a whole on the computer screen, and they were instructed to press the space bar once they had read it; the rest of the sentence was then displayed word by word (200-ms word duration and 500-ms interstimulus interval [ISI]). To reduce the predictability of the target position in the sentence, the critical word was never the first word to appear and its position varied (from third word to eighth word). The task was to read the sentences silently and answer the yes-no question when appropriate. Note that the procedure was similar to that in Martin et al. (2013), the only differences were that the critical word was not presented in the final position and that the ISI was longer (500 ms here vs. 300 ms in Martin et al., 2013). As commonly done in L2 experiments, we opted for a longer ISI (Dowens, Vergara, Barber, & Carreiras, 2010; Foucart & Frenck-Mestre, 2011; Tan­ ner, Mclaughlin, Herschensohn, & Osterhout, 2013; Tokowicz & MacWhinney, 2005); however, since the majority of the sentence context was presented as a whole before the word-by-word pre­

sentation started and that, in over 80% of the sentences, the critical article was presented before the fourth word of the word-by-word presentation (e.g., [Para cortar la came] se/necesita/un/cuchillo/ de/metal/; To cut the meat, one needs a knife of metal [literal translation]), it is unlikely that this modification would allow for strategic processing in the present study that could facilitate an­ ticipation processes (in comparison to Martin et al.’s, 2013 study).

EEG Recording and Data Analysis Electrophysiological data were recorded from 31 tin electrodes attached to an elastic cap (Electrocap International), placed ac­ cording to the standard International 10-20 locations (Jasper, 1958) and referenced on the nose. EEG activity was amplified with a band-pass between 0.1 Hz and 200 Hz, continuously digitized at a sampling rate of 500 Hz, and refiltered offline at 30 Hz low pass. The electrode impedance was set below 5 kfl. Epochs ranged from —100 ms to 1,000 ms after the onset of the critical noun and after the onset of the preceding article. Artifacts were automati­ cally rejected (differences in values 200 pv in 200-ms intervals, and amplitudes of ± 100 pv). Baseline correction was performed in reference to prestimulus activity (-100; 0 ms) and individual averages were digitally rereferenced to the average of the mastoid electrodes. The ERP data were quantified by calculating the mean voltage amplitudes. Based on previous studies, we focused on the main components of interest, the N400. On the article preceding the critical noun, the N400 (thereafter N400a) was analyzed in the canonical 300- to 500-ms time-window as well as on a later time-window (500- to 600-ms) because visual inspection of the grand averages suggested a longer lasting effects in monolinguals and early bilinguals compared to late bilinguals. On the critical noun, analyses were conducted in the 250- to 450-ms and in the 500- to 700-ms time windows for the N400 (thereafter N400n) and anterior positivity, respectively. Analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were performed with Group (Spanish monolinguals, SpanishCatalan early bilinguals and French-Spanish late bilinguals) as a between-participants factor and repeated measures for Expectation (expected vs. unexpected), Cognate (cognate vs. noncognate nouns), Region (Frontal, Central and Parietal), and Electrodes as within-participant factors. The factor Region allowed us to observe the overall distribution of the effect; analyses were conducted on the electrodes at the Frontal (F7, F3, FC5, FC1, Fz, F8, F4, FC6, FC2), Central (T3, C3, CP5, CPI, Cz, T4, C4, CP6, CP2), and Parietal regions (T5, P3 PI, 0 1, 0 2 , P2, T6, P4). In addition, the Pre-Frontal region (Fpl, Fpz, Fp2) was analyzed for the anterior positivity only. When an interaction reached significance post hoc analyses were conducted (Bonferroni test).

Results N400a Time window 300-500 ms. The ANOVAs performed on the N400a mean amplitude (N400 elicited by the article preceding the critical noun) revealed a significant effect of Expectation, F( 1, 51) = 36.28, p < .001, and Region, F(2, 102) = 54.71, p < .001. The interaction Expectation X Region was also significant, F(2, 102) = 3.35, p = .04. Post hoc analyses showed that the effect of

WORD ANTICIPATION IN L2 SENTENCE READING

Expectation was significant over the three regions (p < .001) but was slightly smaller at frontal sites than at central and parietal sites. The factors of Group and Cognate were not significant nor did they interact with other factors. Importantly, the interaction Group X Expectation did not reach significance, F(2, 51) = 1.04, p = .37. These results show that the N400 effect was larger when the article preceding the critical noun mismatched with the gender of the expected noun than when it matched (see Figure 1). The absence of interaction with Group suggests that the modulation of the N400 effect by the Expectation factor was observed in all three groups within the 300- to 500-ms time window. Time window 500-600 ms. The Expectation factor reached significance, F( I, 51) = 8.56, p < .005, and so did the Region factor, F( 2, 102) = 37.31, p < .001. The significant interaction Expectation X Region, F(2, 102) = 6.78, p < .002, revealed that the effect was larger at central (p < .007) and parietal sites (p < .001) than at frontal sites (p < 1). Importantly, the interaction Expectation X Group was significant, F(2, 51) = 3.09, p = .05, due to a significant effect of Expectation for monolinguals (p < .001) and early-bilinguals (p < .02) but not for late bilinguals (p < 1).

Spanish monolinguals

O

1465

French-Spanish Bilinguals In view of the interaction with Group and the differences ob­ served in the visual inspection of the grand averages, we conducted analyses on the French-Spanish bilingual group separately. This was to ascertain that the effect of Expectation was genuinely observed in this group, the main point of the experiment being to investigate the presence of anticipation effects on the article in late bilinguals. Time window 300-500 ms. Analyses showed a significant main effect of Expectation, F (l, 17) = 4.96, p = .04, and of Region, F(2, 34) = 38.66, p < .001. The interaction Expecta­ tion X Region was marginal, F(2, 34) = 2.68, p = .08, and revealed that the effect was larger at parietal sites (p < .002) than at central (p = .08) and frontal sites (p < 1). The factor Cognate did not reach significance nor did it interact with Expectation. Time window 500-600 ms. In this time window, the main effect of Expectation did not reach significance, F (l, 17) = 0.02, p = .87.

Franch-Spanish lata bilinguals



Spanish-Catalan tarty bilinguals

0

3 0 0 m s -5 0 0 ms

-sUv

i'lV ^MV

Figure 1. Top: Event-related potential (ERP) results for the article preceding the critical noun of the sentence, in Spanish monolinguals (left panel), French-Spanish late bilinguals (middle panel), and Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals (right panel). Time zero indicates the presentation of the article. Black lines depict ERPs measured for expected articles; gray lines depict ERPs measured for unexpected articles. ERPs measured over the Frontal (F7, F3, FC5, FC1, Fz, F8, F4, FC6, FC2), Central (T3, C3, CP5, CPI, Cz, T4, C4, CP6, CP2), Parietal (T5, P3, PI, O l, 0 2 , P2, T6, P4) regions. Negativity is plotted up. Bottom: Topographic distributions of the difference between expected and unexpected articles in the 300- to 500-ms time-window.

FOUCART, MARTIN, MORENO, AND COSTA

1466

Overall, means and visual inspection of the grand averages for the French-Spanish bilinguals constantly suggested a larger effect of Expectation for cognates than for noncognates words (larger and longer N400a effect on the article and larger anterior positivity on the noun); however, the interaction Expectation X Cognate never reached statistical significance (probably because of power with only 13 trials in each condition).

N400n The analyses conducted on the N400n (the critical noun) re­ vealed a significant main effect of Expectation, F (l, 51) = 29.9, p < .001, of Cognate, F (l, 51) = 5.58, p = .02, and of Region, F(2, 102) = 15.82, p < .001. The interaction Expectation X Region was significant, F(2, 102) = 3.43, p = .04, and post hoc analysis showed that the effect was significant over all the regions ip < .001) but slightly smaller at frontal sites. The factor Expec­ tation did not significantly interact with Group, or with Cognate. These results show that the N400 effect was larger for unexpected than expected nouns for all three groups (see Figure 2).

Anterior Positivity The ANOVA conducted on prefrontal sites revealed a signifi­ cant effect of Expectation, F (l, 51) = 4.90, p < .03, with no Group interaction, suggesting that the anterior positivity was larger for unexpected than expected nouns for all the groups (see Figure 2). At the three other regions (Frontal, Central and Parietal), the main effect of Expectation was not significant, F (l, 51) = 1.07, p = .31, and it did not interact with Group, Region, nor Cognate.

Discussion The present study investigated anticipation processes during L2 sentence reading. We reasoned that the difficulty associated to L2 processing may render anticipation processes useless during online sentence comprehension. In this respect, our study aimed to com­ plement and extend Martin et al.’s observation regarding the absence of anticipation effects in L2 comprehension in SpanishEnglish bilinguals (Martin et al., 2013). Interestingly, and in con­ trast with that study, we did find anticipation effects when FrenchSpanish late bilinguals were tested in Spanish. Let us first briefly summarize the results, and then discuss their theoretical contribu­ tion and the inconsistencies between the two studies. The main contribution of this study refers to the presence of a modulation of the ERP component (N400) elicited by the article that agreed with the expected versus unexpected noun. This mod­ ulation was observed in all three groups of participants, regardless of their monolingual status and of whether they performed the task in LI or in L2. If we consider this modulation as an index of anticipation processes, we can then conclude that such processes are at play during L2 sentence comprehension. Consistent with this conclusion, in all groups there was also a modulation of the N400 component followed by an anterior positivity associated with expected versus unexpected nouns. Thus, the modulation of the ERP components associated with the article and the noun clearly suggests that anticipation processes are at play in the course of sentence comprehension in a second language. The results of the monolingual group are very similar to those observed previously (DeLong et al., 2005), including those ob­

tained in our laboratory (Martin et al., 2013). However, the results of the L2 participants are in clear conflict with those found by Martin et al. (2013), in which no modulation of the N400 compo­ nent associated with the article was observed for Spanish-English bilinguals during English sentence processing. This result led the authors to conclude that late bilinguals anticipate to a weaker extent than monolinguals, or at least not fast enough to influence linguistic processing prior to the critical noun onset. The issue is to understand the origin of the divergences between the two studies, and especially, how they account for the presence or absence of anticipation processes in L2. As advanced in the Introduction, a critical difference between the two studies is the feature used to index anticipation processes. Indeed, recall that in Martin et al. (2013), the phonological rule that was manipulated (“a/an”) exists in English but not in Spanish, whereas article-noun gender agreement (in the present study) ex­ ists in both Spanish and French, and follows the same rules. Hence, French-Spanish bilinguals might compute agreement between the noun and the article with less difficulty than Spanish-English bilinguals. This is in line with previous studies showing that processing is more difficult when LI and L2 syntactic rules differ across languages (for a review, see Tolentino & Tokowicz, 2011). Consequently, if French-Spanish bilinguals can compute agree­ ment more easily, it allows them to check whether the article matches with their prediction or not. A mismatch between the prediction and the presented article is reflected by a modulation of the N400. If this were to be the case, we can foresee that SpanishEnglish bilinguals would also show signs of anticipation if we were to test them using a feature present in both languages. Hence, if this interpretation is correct we should fully reconsider the conclusion drawn in Martin et al. and argue for a role of antici­ pation processes in L2 comprehension. However, the inconsistency between the two studies may stem from differences in the anticipation processes engaged by the two groups of bilinguals (Spanish-English vs. French-Spanish). It is possible that cross-linguistic similarities may have an impact on anticipation processes in L2. While English and Spanish are lin­ guistically apart, French and Spanish are very similar; and our results suggest that this similarity may have facilitated preactiva­ tion of the expected noun.2 Recall that half of the critical words were cognates, and the results for French-Spanish bilinguals showed a slightly larger (but not significant) effect for cognates than for noncognates (larger and longer N400 effect on the article and larger anterior positivity on the noun), which indicates that anticipation processes might be facilitated when the expected noun is more easily available. As suggested by Van Assche et al. (2011), it seems that in high constrained sentences, the lexical represen­ tation of the expected noun is preactivated in both languages; hence, if the lexical and syntactic features of the two representa­ tions are identical (i.e., cognates), anticipation processes should be facilitated (see Van Assche et al., 2011, 2012, for more details on bilingual word recognition in high-constrained sentences). Note 2 The similarity between French and Spanish is likely to have facilitated not only the activation of the expected word but also the processing of the whole sentence context. Consequently, anticipating upcoming words as the sentence was unfolding may have been easier here than in Martin et al. (2013) This might also account for the absence of anterior positivity in the L2 group in Martin et al.

WORD ANTICIPATION IN L2 SENTENCE READING

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Figure 2. Top: Event-related potential (ERP) results for the critical noun of the sentence, in Spanish monolinguals (left panel), French-Spanish late bilinguals (middle panel), and Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals (right panel). Time zero indicates the presentation of the noun. Black lines depict ERPs measured for expected articles; gray lines depict ERPs measured for unexpected nouns. ERPs measured over the Frontal (F7, F3, FC5, FC1, Fz, F8, F4, FC6, FC2), Central (T3, C3, CP5, CPI, Cz, T4, C4, CP6, CP2), Parietal (T5, P3, PI, 0 1 , 02^ P2, T6, P4) regions. Negativity is plotted up. Bottom: Topographic distributions of the difference between expected and unexpected nouns in the 250- to 450-ms and 500- to 700-ms time-windows.

that this facilitation might also explain the shorter N400 effect on the article for the late bilinguals compared to the other two groups. Indeed, the effects observed for cognate words were similar in the three groups, but the N400 on the article and anterior positivity on the noun were reduced for noncognates. However, this explanation must be considered with caution as the interaction Expectation X Cognate did not reach significance. If it were to be the case that cross-linguistic similarities impact anticipation processes, we can foresee that the closer the languages in terms of lexical, syntactic, and phonological properties, the higher the chances that anticipa­

tion processes be present in L2 comprehension. Our results do not allow us to decide on one explanation over the other. Finally, one difference that might account for the contrast be­ tween our results and Martin et al.’s (2013) is that the ISI was longer in our study. But as mentioned in the procedure, the sentence context was presented as a whole; hence, anticipation processes were most certainly already engaged by the time wordby-word presentation started. Thus, this is unlikely that presenta­ tion rate accounts for the difference between the results. Moreover, the effects observed in the monolingual group were similar in both

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studies (as well as in Delong et al.’s, 2005), which suggests that longer presentation rate did not affect anticipation processes in this group. It is a possibility that slower readers may show anticipation effects; this is an open issue for Martin et al.’s study. What is more likely, however, is that anticipation processes would be affected by a drastic increase of speed such as in natural conversations; we are currently investigating this question in our research group. Our contribution is to show that anticipation processes are at play during L2 sentence reading and that L2 comprehenders rely on both anticipation and integration processes, at least when the two languages belong to the same linguistic family. This clearly goes beyond and significantly alters the conclusions advanced in Martin et al.’s (2013) study. In sum, the difference in LI and L2 anticipation processes observed in Martin et al. (2013) seems to have been caused by difficult processing in L2 and not by a fundamental difference between LI and L2 anticipation processes. Our findings suggest that, like in L I, both passive resonance processes and active prediction mechanisms may be at play during L2 sentence reading. Altogether, the observations of these two studies suggest that language similarity might be the key factor, even more than immersion duration. Indeed, the Spanish-English bilinguals tested in Martin et al. learned their L2 earlier in life than the FrenchSpanish bilinguals in the present study (10 years [SD: 2] and 14 years [SD: 4.5] for Spanish and French speakers, respectively), and they were immersed in the L2 country for a longer period (4.7 years [SD: 2.3] vs. 1.7 years [SD: 1.8] in the present study). Before concluding, there are two observations in the framework of LI processing that are worth mentioning. First, we reported an anterior positivity associated to unexpected nouns. This observa­ tion contributes to the robustness of this effect that has only been recently reported in the literature. The origin and the exact condi­ tions under which this positivity is present are still unclear. Still, its presence in our study is consistent with the interpretation that assumes that it originates as a result of disconfirmed lexical prediction (DeLong et al., 2012; Federmeier et al., 2007; Van Petten & Luka, 2012, for a review). Second, in our study, anticipation effects on the article were reflected by a negativity, as reported in previous studies (DeLong et al., 2005; Martin et al., 2013; Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2003), which contrasts with the positivity reported in other studies (Van Berkum et al., 2005; Wicha et al., 2004). Although, we have not a clear way to reconcile the discrepancy between all the studies, it is important to discuss the differences between our study and Wicha et al.’s (2004), since we followed their design. Importantly, their experimental conditions involved semantic violations (on the noun) and syntactic violations (gender mismatch between the preceding article and the noun). In contrast, our design did not involve any violations. The presence of many violations might have influenced the way the article was processed when its gender did not match with that of the expected word. Interestingly, how­ ever, using the same materials but replacing the noun by a line drawing, Wicha et al. (2003) observed a negativity on the article. Hence, it seems that the difference of effects between Wicha et al.’s (2004) study and the present one may originate from meth­ odological differences. At any rate, what is important for our purposes here is that, to the extent that the ERP modulation on the article indexes some sort

of anticipation processes, we can conclude that these are present in both LI and in L2 comprehension.

Conclusion The present study reveals that L2 sentence comprehension in­ volves anticipation processes of the same nature to those involved in LI processing. This suggests that the difficulties present in L2 sentence comprehension do not stem from the inability to use sentence context to predict upcoming words. Our results comple­ ment and, to some extent, modify the conclusions drawn by Martin et al., by showing that when a bilingual’s languages are relatively similar, anticipation processes are detectable. Nevertheless, given that linguistic processing can become native-like as proficiency increases even when the LI and the L2 are lexically and syntac­ tically apart (Dussias, 2003, 2004; Gabriele, Fiorentino, & Bafion, 2013; Rossi, Gugler, Friederici, & Hahne, 2006), we foresee that highly proficient bilinguals would anticipate upcoming words like monolingual even when their two languages present crosslinguistic differences. Further research is required to confirm this hypothesis.

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Received June 27, 2013 Revision received February 24, 2014 Accepted March 6, 2014 ■

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