Brain Activity During Second Language Processing (ERP)

D. J. DAVIDSON

Overview
The electroencephalogram (EEG) offers a unique view of second language (L2) processing because it is one of the few noninvasive techniques available within cognitive neuroscience to directly examine brain function during key events that take place during language comprehension. An EEG recording is a record of large-scale electrical activity of the brain over time, usually recorded with an electrode attached to the skin on the scalp. Primarily because it offers good time resolution, and because it is somewhat better suited to receptive language processing rather than production, researchers have used EEG to address questions about the functional organization of second language (L2) comprehension and learning. The time resolution of EEG enables it to capture the rapidly changing electrical response to individual words, morphemes, or speech sounds. Because of this, experiments are often conducted to examine rst and/or second language performance using tasks that require listeners (or readers) to comprehend relatively short-duration material such as syllables, words, or sentences. The average response is then used, for example, to better understand when or how L1 and L2 language processing differ in the rst few moments after the onset of a word, and also how these responses change over time during learning. A related technique is magnetoencephalography (MEG), which records a signal that is the magnetic counterpart to the EEG. Because of the properties of magnetic elds with respect to the skull, it is in many cases simpler to relate the MEG to the underlying cortical regions that are active in an experiment, compared to EEG. For this reason MEG is often used in conjunction with anatomical information available using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to provide spatial information about the source of the electrical activity. Although there are important differences between EEG and MEG, this entry will largely focus on EEG, as it is by far the most commonly used approach for L2 research to date. After a brief introduction, this entry will provide an overview of some of the major ndings that have accumulated in the literature on L2 electrophysiology.

Basis of the EEG and ERP Signal

The EEG Signal
Neurons communicate with each other via complex electrical-chemical processes at a very small spatial scale relative to the size of an EEG electrode, and this raises the question: What does the scalp-recorded EEG signal actually represent? As a rst approximation, the EEG is believed to be a large-scale measure that reects the spatial alignment and temporally synchronous activity of groups of a certain types of neurons, with the largest contribution from pyramidal cells. When these cells are active together in time, the electrical potential generated is large enough to be recorded with an external electrode on the skin, with respect to a reference electrode at a different location also on the skin. In the case that cells
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle. 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0106

brain activity during second language processing ( erp )

within the group are not synchronously active for a long enough period of time to sum, then the group activity will not be large enough to be observed, even if some individual cells are very active for shorter periods of time. For example, rapid events such as individual spikes from action potentials are not usually seen in EEG recordings under ordinary recording procedures. Also, if groups of neurons lack a parallel spatial orientation, an external sensor would not easily register their activity, whether or not it is synchronous. The EEG is therefore a selective measure of cortical electrical activity. It represents a certain timescale of activity from cells in a specic spatial arrangement. An important implication of this selectivity is that many important electrical events are almost certainly missed by the EEG recordings. These considerations are probably most important for work that explicitly tries to link physiological processes in neurons and the cognitive operations that are believed to occur during (L2) listening or reading. Most studies of L2 processing, however, use EEG recordings more heuristically, as a gross measure of electrical activity without very specic assumptions about the link. These measures of electrical activity are termed components, which are spatial and temporal patterns of activity across the array of electrodes on the scalp. As an aside, it is good to bear in mind that in most recording arrangements the activity recorded with EEG is a difference between a given electrode and a reference electrode, thus reecting activity measured at both sensors. Very often the reference electrode for EEG is placed in a standard location, such as behind one of the ears, or the nose, to make it easier to compare studies. Before describing the components, it is worth describing a few common features of psycholinguistic experiments using electrophysiology. Very often, participants in an experiment listen to or read stimuli presented over a series of trials. Each trial is simply the presentation of a single stimulus, such as a word or a sentence, possibly followed by a motor response if participants are asked to make a judgment or decision about the stimulus. Usually, there are one or more different experimental conditions to be compared, and there are multiple occurrences of a single type of trial in the same experimental condition. For example, an experiment examining spoken word recognition might examine L1 and L2 word recognition by comparing the response to L1 words on some trials and L2 words on other trials. The reason for the multiple trials is that EEG recordings are subject to a great deal of noise or otherwise ongoing but unrelated brain activity, and a more consistent measure of the brain activity that is related to the stimulus can be obtained by repeating a given experimental condition many times. This does not mean that exactly the same stimulus is repeated (necessarily), but rather the experimental condition is repeated with a different word or sentence on each trial. For example, in the example for auditory word recognition, there might be 80 distinct L1 words presented versus 80 distinct L2 words presented in the experiment.

Event-Related Potential (ERP)

The most common measure (or model) for brain activity in L2 electrophysiology is the event-related potential (ERP). This is simply the average response in a group of trials recorded in a given experimental condition, where the average is calculated for each moment in time after the onset of the stimulus (or, in some cases, before a motor response). The ERP is a summary statistic because it uses a single time series, the average, to represent the important properties of the response for the entire group of trials. An assumption of this statistic is that the brain response to the stimulus reoccurs at a consistent time after the onset of the stimulus, and that other activity without this consistent timing is noise or unrelated activity. Before taking the average, researchers typically subtract a baseline from the response to reduce the impact of variation that is considered noise. Alternatively, a high-pass lter

brain activity during second language processing ( erp )

might be applied to the data. The baseline is usually dened as a short interval of time before the onset of a stimulus. The average value of the potential in this baseline interval is then subtracted from each point in the response interval. For this reason the baselined ERP often appears as positive or negative deections from the zero potential, appearing very often as a dampened sinusoidal waveform. It should be kept in mind, however, that the actual average potential in the baseline time interval is not necessarily zero; it simply appears this way because of the baselining procedure. The ERP waveform is usually described in terms of its features: the timing and magnitude of the most salient features of the waveform. The rst few positive and negative deections, occurring at approximately 100 ms and 200 ms respectively, might be termed the N100 and P200 components, for example, reecting the polarity (N for negative potential, P for positive potential) and the approximate latency (e.g., 100 ms) of the peak of the component. Other components are named similarly, sometimes with designators to describe the general spatial location of the component on the electrode array. Two of the most important features of the ERP are the amplitude relative to the zero potential baseline, and second, the latency of a peak of a component (the point with the highest amplitude when there is clearly a single peak), relative to an event like word onset. These features have been shown to be responsive to several variables which are related to L2 language performance. Note that other summary statistics reecting other aspects of brain activity, such as the average event-related time-frequency spectrum, or the average phase spectrum, can also be calculated from EEG data. However, their use in L2 research has not been widespread to date. When one waveform in a condition is subtracted from another waveform in a different condition, the result is a difference waveform. It reects time points when the two ERP waveforms diverge from each other. Many classical ERP effects are difference waveforms in this respect. Several typical effects seen in response to spoken or written words include the N400 effect, a negative potential difference wave beginning at approximately 300 ms and peaking at approximately 400 ms after word onset, and the P600 difference wave, a positive potential difference wave which begins at approximately 500 ms after word onset, and appears as a long-lasting shift, often without a single peak. In many experiments the N400 effect amplitude is responsive to the semantic relationships within the sentence. The P600 effect is likewise responsive to syntactic relationships within the sentence in many cases. It is also the case that many studies show a posterior distribution of both of these patterns. This means that the electrodes where the N400 or P600 difference waves are largest tend to be at the back part of the head. The timing, the polarity, and the approximate spatial focus of the difference wave are diagnostic features employed by almost all ERP studies of L2 (and L1) linguistic processing. Note that these patterns are general trends across studies, but there are important cases in which the N400 effect is seen in response to a syntactic contrast, and the P600 effect is seen in response to a semantic contrast. Another difference wave that has been important in studies of morphology or grammar is the left anterior negativity (LAN) effect, a negative difference wave appearing in approximately the same time window as the N400 effect, but with a left frontal focus on the scalp electrodes.

Properties of the ERP

There are several reasons why the features of the ERP waveform are used. The relatively high time resolution allows researchers to isolate a brain response with short duration. For example, spoken sentences unfold over time, and a given word might not have a duration longer than half a second. The ERP can reect responses that occur within a few hundreds of milliseconds following a stimulus, therefore can reect activity that is specic to a given word within the sentence in many circumstances. It is worth noting, however,

brain activity during second language processing ( erp )

that the response to individual words within a sentence often overlaps from one word to the next, and the degree of overlap will depend on the rate of speech or the presentation rate of the stimuli more generally. For this reason, some studies use serially presented words with a relatively slow rate of visual presentation to articially separate the response to individual words. It does not appear that there is a consensus in the literature about the side effects of the different modes of stimulus presentation, but both auditory and serial visual presentation remain in use.

Longitudinal and Group Comparisons

In L2 research, often experiments compare the ERPs of different groups of participants to investigate a question. Some examples include comparisons such as monolingual versus multilingual subjects, or early-acquisition versus late-acquisition learners. In these cases, the participants are selected for the study so that the groups are approximately matched on characteristics such as age, gender, handedness, and other factors that are likely to affect the results. This is done so that a comparison of the groups is likely to reveal only the inuence of the factor which differentiates the groups (e.g., early versus late acquisition) and not other known factors. However, it is often the case that one of the groups is more variable than the other in their response, and it is difcult to distinguish systematic group variation from individual subject variation. Also, when participants are selected for a study, it is possible that preexisting differences might inuence the pattern seen in an experiment. One approach to this problem of individual variation is to examine the changing patterns of ERPs over time in a longitudinal study (Osterhout, McLaughlin, Kim, Greenwald, & Inoue, 2004). Whereas group comparisons characterize L2 speakers with differences in preexisting knowledge or experience, longitudinal studies track the acquisition (or development) of this knowledge over time. The longitudinal approach compares each participant against their own previous response to show a difference over time. In some cases this allows the design to factor out individual differences, especially when the learners in the longitudinal design start with little or no previous knowledge of the language they are learning. Longitudinal designs also characterize the dynamics of the changing ERP patterns, and this may be informative about how the knowledge is acquired.

Phonological Processes
Studies of sublexical L2 processing have for the most part employed a component known as the mismatch negativity (MMN). This component is seen during passive listening tasks in which listeners hear a series of standard stimuli (such as a phoneme or syllable), and an occasional mismatching stimulus. The mismatching stimulus elicits a larger amplitude waveform. This is believed to reect the time when a cortical region registers the difference between standard and deviant stimuli. Studies of the MMN have shown that the effect can be seen in both younger and older L2 learners, but in the case that an L2 learner begins studying a second language relatively late, then the amplitude of the MMN is reduced for phonological contrasts in that L2.

Lexical and Morphological Processes

There have been many studies of the response to single words comparing L1 and L2 stimuli. Most often studies have examined the N400 component, a negative potential component with a posterior spatial focus, peaking around 400 ms after the onset of a word. The N400 is affected by a wide variety of contextual relationships, including semantic

brain activity during second language processing ( erp )

meaning or association when words are presented in pairs. Studies that have examined the N400 component have found that the contextual inuence on the N400 is similar in the L1 and L2, but also that L2 prociency has an important inuence. Lower L2 prociency is associated with a reduced semantic context effect, but not a reduced associative context effect. With respect to word morphology, differences between L1 and L2 speakers have been observed in processing inectional morphology. For example, Hahne, Mueller, and Clahsen (2006) have found that overapplication of an inectional plural rule for nouns results in only a P600 in L2 learners, in contrast to both a LAN and P600 that has been found in native speakers. Contrasts of verbal inection showed an anterior negativity in the learners as well as a P600. In their experiments, the misapplications of irregular morphology led to a distinct N400 response. These results suggest that the electrophysiological response to morphological violations in learners can appear in a form similar to that of native speakers.

Grammatical or Syntactic Processes

In studies of syntactic or grammatical processes, researchers have most often examined the response to a single word or morpheme, the so-called critical word, presented in the course of a sentence. In many studies, one sentence will contain a grammatical mistake or error at the critical word, and this is compared to a control sentence which is otherwise like the violation sentence except for the mistake. The interest of such studies is to examine when differences emerge in the response to the violation critical word relative to the control, and moreover, how these differences are related to L2 knowledge, skill, and development. The classical components described earlier (LAN effect, P600 effect) have been examined in several L2L1 pairs, at various levels of group prociency. The appearance of the P600 effect seems to be modulated by prociency and age of acquisition, and possibly the particular language pairs that are involved in the study. Bilinguals who begin acquisition of both languages relatively early show a P600, and it is also seen in learners who start an L2 relatively late but who are nonetheless procient in the L2. It appears that the P600 is more likely to be seen in an L2 if the L2 is part of the same language family as the L1 (e.g., Germanic), which is also likely to be correlated with prociency. It should be noted that not all studies have observed the P600 in L2 learners, as some results have shown atypical patterns of the P600. So far, the LAN effect, including the early LAN effect (ELAN), although it has been studied less extensively for L2 learners than the P600, appears to be less commonly reported in the literature. The ELAN has only been reported in the case of relatively procient L2 users (Rossi, Gugler, Hahne, & Friederici, 2006). Recent experiments have examined patterns of ERPs with longitudinal designs. To date, no study has observed a LAN effect over time, but interestingly, an N400 has been reported in addition to the expected P600, as learners gain L2 prociency (Osterhout et al., 2004).

Semantic Processes
Like single-word studies, semantic processing for L2 comprehenders has been examined in sentences using the relationship between a critical word and the preceding context. The same logic of comparison between a violation condition and a control condition is followed in this type of design, often comparing groups of learners with different backgrounds of experience or prociency. The results of these studies have shown that an N400 effect can be seen in sentence context for L2 users, and it has a similar spatial pattern in the rst and second language

brain activity during second language processing ( erp )

users in most studies. In some cases there is a delay in the peak of the N400 for the L2. Studies that have independently examined the contribution of age of acquisition and prociency have shown that both contribute to the delay in the peak. There is some variability in the N400 effect seen across studies, as some have reported no difference while a few cases have reported a larger N400.

Other Uses of the ERP Methodology

A small number of studies have employed ERPs to examine L2 production (see Hanulov, Davidson, & Indefrey, in press, for review). In the case of production, an additional complication is that signal artifacts associated with muscle movements of the face and larynx make it difcult to study the production of full sentences. Researchers have instead concentrated on picture-naming tasks in which a single lexical term is to be produced to label an object. For example, Christoffels, Firk, and Schiller (2007) examined the rst half second after the appearance of a picture, but before actual articulation, to study language switching in bilinguals. Among other ndings, they showed that naming pictures in an L1 resulted in a more negative waveform than an L2 at approximately 375 to 475 ms after picture onset, which is a relatively late difference in some models of production. Guo and Peng (2007) used a different technique, a go-no go task in conjunction with picture naming, to study L2 production with an ERP effect known as the N200 effect. The go-no go task required participants either to make or withhold decisions about semantic or phonological properties of the to-be-produced picture names in the task. The N200 appears on trials where a response must be withheld in the go-no go task, and the assumption is that the response can only be withheld when there is enough information available during production to actually suppress it. This can be used, for example, to compare semantic versus phonological decisions during word production. By comparing the latency of the ERP effect for these two types of decisions, Guo and Peng (2007) found no difference in the latency difference between semantic and phonological N200s when comparing a native L1 group versus the L2 of a learner group (see also Hanulov et al., in press). These ndings seem to suggest that delays in L2 word naming might stem from differences in relatively late word-production processes.

Conclusions
Electrophysiological research is largely complementary to experiments that use behavioral techniques, in the sense that it provides more direct information about brain activity. Behavioral techniques such as response time or eye-tracking techniques are much simpler to use in experiments, but often require the arrangement of a specialized task for participants so that a behavioral response can be measured. In contrast, electrophysiological experiments do not necessarily require a behavioral task in many cases, as the EEG response directly reects brain activity. As such, EEG studies are probably most useful for testing hypotheses about brain function, and their relationship to behavioral measures is an active research question. The research reported to date on second language processing has so far not reported an electrophysiological effect that has not already been seen in studies of L1 processing, and a relatively common nding is that certain effects which are consistently observed in L1 users are less consistently observed in L2 users. The electrophysiological response to speech sounds and words appears to be qualitatively similar in L2 listeners and readers to that of the L1, with largely quantitative differences in the ERPs that have been reported. At the level of sentence processing, it appears that both syntactic and semantic violation effects

brain activity during second language processing ( erp )

can be observed, but that syntactic violation responses are more variable than semantic effects. Age of acquisition and prociency both seem to play a role in determining this variability, and the greater variability of the syntactic response would suggest that the grammatical system is more vulnerable to variation in the timing and intensity of input during acquisition or learning. SEE ALSO: Inhibition and Control in Second Language Acquisition; Research Techniques and the Bilingual Brain; Second Language Representation in the Brain; Sentence and Discourse Processing in Second Language Comprehension

References
Christoffels, I. K., Firk, C., & Schiller, N. O. (2007). Bilingual language control: An event-related brain potential study. Brain Research, 1147, 192208. Guo, T. M., & Peng, D. L. (2007). Speaking words in the second language: From semantics to phonology in 170 ms. Neuroscience Research, 57(3), 38792. Hahne, A., Mueller, J. L., & Clahsen, H. (2006). Morphological processing in a second language: Behavioral and event-related brain potential evidence for storage and decomposition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 12134. Hanulov, J., Davidson, D. J., & Indefrey, P. (in press). Where does the delay in L2 picture naming come from? Psycholinguistic and neurocognitive evidence on second language word production. Language and Cognitive Processes. Osterhout, L., McLaughlin, J., Kim, A., Greenwald, R., & Inoue, K. (2004). Sentences in the brain: Event-related potentials as real-time reections of sentence comprehension and language learning. In M. Carreiras & C. Clifton (Eds.), The online study of sentence comprehension: Eyetracking, ERP, and beyond (pp. 271308). Hove, England: Psychology Press. Rossi, S., Gugler, M. F., Hahne, A., & Friederici, A. D. (2006). The impact of prociency on syntactic second-language processing of German and Italian: Evidence from event-related potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 203048.

Suggested Readings
Kotz, S. A. (2009). A critical review of ERP and fMRI evidence on L2 syntactic processing. Brain and Language, 109, 6874. Kutas, M., Van Petten, C., & Kluender, R. (2006). Psycholinguistics electried II: 19942005. In M. J. Traxler & M. A. Gernsbacher (Eds.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics (2nd ed., pp. 659724). London, England: Academic Press. Nunez, P. L., & Srinivasan, R. (2006). Electric elds of the brain: The neurophysics of EEG. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Weber-Fox, C. M., & Neville, H. J. (1996). Maturational constraints on functional specializations for language processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 8, 23156.