violations. Our study opens up the possibility of the second interpretation:
in the design used here, these components are not relevant (hence not dis-
cussed here). What the N2 modulation pattern indicates is that bilingual
participants withheld decision-making before the violation, unlike mono-
lingual participants who were unable to withhold decision-making. This
finding is linked to the presence of a component in the ERPs of bilinguals
(i.e. N2), which is absent in the case of the monolingual participants. This
opens the possibility that bilinguals are not unable to detect violations,
rather they are more tolerant because of the structure of their other lan-
guage. Note that in the familiar literature, little attention has been paid to
the question of whether the structures tested differ between the two lan-
guages of the bilingual participants or not (notable exception is Bourguignon
et al., 2010). The present study focused on two languages with conflicting
grammatical rules. In order to give more definitive answers to the question,
future research will need to aim at testing bilingual speakers of various
language pairs, some exhibiting conflicting grammatical rules and others
identical grammatical rules.
This line of research could also provide important insights into the study
of intra-sentential code-switching (see also Chapters 5 and 6). Research on
lexical switching has found evidence of processing costs associated with
switching languages, but very little is known about the processing of lexical
switches within a sentential context (i.e. when a sentence contains lexical
items that come from two different languages, see Moreno et al., 2002;
Proverbio et al., 2004). The present study shows that bilinguals are open to
grammatical switches as a result of language co-activation. Future research
can determine the extent to which bilinguals are open to different types of
grammatical switches accompanied by a lexical switch; this can serve as an
evaluation tool for competing theories of code-switching (e.g. MacSwan,
2000; Myers-Scotton, 2002; see Chapters 5 and 6).
Interestingly, our experimental results also indicated that bilinguals
were able to follow the experimental instructions more accurately than
monolinguals. The electrophysiological measures taken showed that bilin-
gual participants managed to ignore the content of a mismatching noun
when more information was required in order to make a decision. This
could be seen as a cognitive advantage to be added to the list of cognitive
advantages of bilingualism that have been reported in a number of areas
inside and outside language. These include facilitation effects in lexical deci-
sion tasks (see above, e.g. Dijkstra et al., 1999) where knowledge of one
language results in better performance in a task in the other language, when
compared to monolinguals, as well as advantages in nonverbal executive
control tasks (see, e.g. Bialystok et al., 2004; Bialystok et al., 2006; Costa
et al., 2008). However, our study does not provide any information regarding
the generic value of this temporisation process as it was only tested in a
verbal context.
Juggling Two Grammars 229