bilingual group only. In the adjective-first condition, however, both partici-
pant groups ignored the adjective when it did not match the colour of the
picture and deferred decision-making until they had seen the subsequent
noun, which provided the critical information.
We interpret this difference between groups as evidence for cross-lan-
guage syntactic activation in the bilingual group. In everyday life, English
speakers cannot reasonably expect to encounter an adjective after seeing a
noun since that would be ungrammatical. Monolingual speakers in this
experiment did not expect to see an adjective following a noun, even when
this configuration was encountered frequently (but not consistently) in the
experiment. Recall that in filler trials the noun was presented without being
followed by an adjective (see stimuli (4)i, (4)j) to prevent participants form-
ing a systematic expectancy of adjectives when they encountered the noun
in first position. In other words, the presence of an adjective in second posi-
tion was not systematic when participants read a noun in first position.
Overall, irrespectively of whether or not the noun matched the picture pre-
sented previously, English monolinguals behaved as if they made a decision
regarding their response upon reading the noun, because they could not
anticipate that an upcoming adjective could change this decision.
This difference between adjective-first and noun-first conditions in the
English monolingual group relates to the syntactic constraints of the English
language. Monolingual English speakers cannot anticipate an element that
violates a grammatical rule of their language, namely an adjective follow-
ing a noun, even though that element may carry crucial information for
226 Part 5: The Bilingual Brain
Figure 10.2 Averaged waveforms obtained from electrode FCZ for each of the language
groups. Nouns. Go and No-Go conditions