The Electrophysiology of the Bilingual Brain

In this chapter, we focus on how bilinguals cope with reading individual words and sentences in their different languages, and on how electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings could be used to explore the time course of the cognitive processes underlying bilingual comprehension of visually delivered linguistic stimuli. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) comparing native and nonnative written language processing have been repeatedly used to reveal effects that occur very early in the stream of processing and that are essential for a correct understanding of the cognitive processes leading to efficient word and sentence processing by multilingual readers. We summarize the most relevant studies from this field and offer a list of recommendations for researchers aiming at using EEG recordings as a tool to investigate the complex pattern of feed-forward and feedback interactive activations flowing along the visual recognition system that ultimately lead to efficient bilingual reading.