The task followed a Go/No-Go format: participants were asked to
respond only when either the colour adjective or the object noun matched
the properties of the picture presented at the beginning of each trial and to
withhold their response when neither the adjective nor the noun matched
the colour or nature of the object presented in the picture. For example, fol-
lowing the picture of a red book, participants would be required to respond
if the sentence mentioned a red car, as the colour matches the picture, a blue
book, as the object name matches the picture, or a red book, as both the colour
and the object name match the picture. They would be expected to refrain
from responding if the sentence mentioned a blue car, as neither the colour
nor the object name matched the picture.
In this study, we concentrated on a specific part of the overall task which
in itself formed a Go/No-Go task. Specifically, the word within the sentence
that follows the initial article (the words ‘red’ or ‘blue’ in the examples above)
acted as the critical stimulus for decision-making. Following the picture of the
red book, for instance, the matching adjective red was a Go stimulus. In con-
trast, the mismatching adjective blue was a No-Go stimulus. We shall be refer-
ring to the word following the article (‘blue’ or ‘red’ in our example) as ‘first
word’, while we shall be referring to the word after that (‘book’ in our exam-
ple) as ‘second word’. When participants were presented with a first word that
matched the picture (Go stimulus), the decision to respond could take place,
while in cases when the first word did not match the picture (No-Go stimulus)
the decision whether to respond or not had to be postponed until the second
word was processed. Note that throughout the chapter, the terms Go/No-Go
always refer to the first word, irrespectively of whether at the end of the trial
(after seeing the second word) the participant was required to respond or not.
In the conditions that involved the adjective–noun word order standard
in English we expected a significant N2 amplitude difference between Go
and No-Go stimuli in both groups (English monolingual and Welsh-English
bilingual participants), that is N2 amplitude would be greater for colour
adjectives that mismatch the picture colour than those which match the
picture colour.
In order to test for Welsh word order effects, some of the sentences fea-
tured the object noun presented first (first word) and the colour adjective
second (second word), as in ‘The book red was on the left’. These were sentences
that contained a syntactic violation, but followed a word order that would
be grammatical if the sentence had been in Welsh.
In the same way as described previously for standard word order, Go
trials were those in which the noun matched the picture, whereas decision
to respond or not had to be postponed when the noun did not match the
picture. For instance, following the picture of the red book, the matching
noun book indicated a Go trial but the mismatching noun car meant that the
decision-making needed to be postponed until the adjective was presented
(No-Go trial).
Juggling Two Grammars 221