L+PLUS Lab

Bilingual lexical access

In a project lead by lab member Stephanie Aedo Vega, we use behavioral and EEG measures to look at lexical processing in Spanish-English bilinguals, to explore how related words are processed in the bilingual lexicon.

We focus on the processing of words which exist solely in English or Spanish, at orthographically identical cognates (e.g. 'hospital', which exists in both languages), at false friends (e.g., 'apology' and 'apologia') and nonwords. With this data, we will address whether false friends show a facilitation effect, as seen with cognates in a number of previous studies, or whether they are processed more similarly to words.