Anticipation processes in L2 speech comprehension: Evidence from ERPs and lexical recognition task

Abstract

The present study investigated anticipation processes in L2 speech comprehension. French–Spanish late bilinguals were presented with high-constrained Spanish sentences. ERPs were time-locked on the article preceding the critical noun, which was muted to avoid overlapping effects. Articles that mis-matched the gender of the expected nouns triggered a negativity. A subsequent lexical recognition task revealed that words expected from the context were (falsely) recognised significantly more often than unexpected words, even though all were muted. Overall, the results suggest that anticipation processes are at play during L2 speech processing, and allow creating a memory trace of a word prior to presentation.