Online Comprehension of Verbs in Hindi English Bilinguals

Abstract

Verb information plays a crucial role in sentence processing by joining and newlineorganizing sentential parts - the subject, the object, and various oblique objects and newlinesubordinate clause together to form a coherent structure for determining its meaning. newlineHowever, the process of linking the noun in a clause to the main verb of the clause is newlineconstrained by the verb s selectional preferences. The current study examined how newlinelisteners process information about verbs in the context of both syntactic and semantic newlineaspects of sentence processing and more specifically the online comprehension of verbs newlineusing ERPs as a methodology to understand the time course. newlineWhile Hindi is a free word order language, English is a fixed word order newlinelanguage. We performed two experiments to investigate processing of sentences with newlinedifferent word orders in Hindi (Study1) and same word order in Hindi and English (Study newline2). The experiments were performed to understand the neural mechanisms underlying newlinescrambling among Hindi-English bilinguals. Since, in a multilingual context the newlineproficiency of one language may affect the processing of the other language, we also newlinelooked at the role of proficiency (especially in L2) in Study 2. Hindi sentences with three newlineword orders SOV, OSV and SVO were used in Study 1. Hindi and English sentences with newlineSVO were used in Study 2. We found no canonical advantage for processing sentences in newlineHindi (Study 1). In both the studies, we found LAN within the time frame of 250-480ms newlineafter the stimulus onset predominantly towards the frontal and anterior-frontal newlineelectrodes. Highly proficient participants in both Hindi and English showed larger newlineamplitude compared to the group that was high proficiency in Hindi and low proficiency newlinein English (Study 2). The multilingual context affects sentence processing in L1, i.e. the newlineprocessing of sentences in SVO word order in Hindi was affected by proficiency in newlineEnglish. The results provide evidence for the role of specific cognitive processes newline(working memory) behind non-canonical senten