lexical processing in one language takes place, the bilingual’s other language
is also activated (see also Wu & Thierry, 2010).
These studies have provided convincing evidence that when a bilingual
individual accesses a word in one of his/her two languages, properties of
the lexicon of the other language are also activated and can affect the bilin-
gual’s manipulations of the word. Depending on the nature of the task, this
activation can have facilitatory or inhibitory effects (Dijkstra et al., 1999);
in other words, a bilingual individual may perform worse than a monolin-
gual in certain linguistic tasks performed in one language due to the activa-
tion of his/her other language – while s/he may outperform monolinguals
in other tasks.
The Present Study
Rationale
In this chapter, we apply the question of language co-activation to the
field of bilingual syntactic access; we report on the findings of a study that
was aimed at examining whether, when a bilingual individual processes sen-
tences in one of his/her two languages, properties of the grammar of the
other language are also activated. The study used the technique of ERPs, and
it focused on the cross-linguistic variation in the adjective–noun word order.
Participants
We tested 18 monolingual English speakers (mean age 19 years, age range
18–22, 15 women, one left-handed) and 16 Welsh-English highly proficient
early bilinguals (mean age 23 years, age range 18–37, 14 women, two left-
handed). Participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision with no
symptoms or history of developmental dyslexia. The experiment was
approved by the local ethics committee of the School of Psychology at Bangor
University. Participants’ informed consent was obtained prior to the experi-
ment. Participants were paid either with course credits or cash. Bilingual
participants had been exposed to both languages before the age of eight and
they were fluent in both English and Welsh, according to self-report.
All participants completed a grammar test as an additional measurement
of their English. The test consisted of grammaticality judgments on 56
English sentences whose Welsh translation involved either a similar or a dif-
ferent structure. The latter condition (different structure) included, among
others, sentences with adjective–noun (grammatical) or noun–adjective
(ungrammatical) sequences. For example:
(3) a. The pretty flower is in the garden. (grammatical)
b. *The lion big is under the tree. (ungrammatical)
Juggling Two Grammars 217