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EEG and Event-Related Brain Potentials

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Designing Research on Bilingual Development

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Abstract

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have become a standard method in many areas of cognitive research, including second-language research, over the last decade and a half (Van Hell and Tokowicz 2010). ERPs can provide evidence which is central to the controversy on the similarity or difference of first and second-language processing. However, they provide a challenge which can be daunting for a large-scale multi-lab study, because there are so many technical details which vary from lab to lab, making it difficult to acquire data that is fully comparable across testing sites. In this chapter we will discuss a number of aspects of ERP measurement, focusing partly on experimental designs and partly on the way in which data from different languages and different labs can successfully be combined. These aspects will require somewhat more detail than the techniques treated in previous chapters.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A full, in-depth discussion of the ERP technique is beyond the scope of this text; the reader is referred to Luck (2014) for a comprehensive introduction. We confine the discussion here to the points that are relevant for our purpose.

  2. 2.

    Slow waves, also called DC potentials, begin to emerge at least 500 ms after stimulus onset and often last for several seconds. They usually appear as negative deflections and have a less distinct peak.

  3. 3.

    Loerts’ study includes a third type of sentence, namely indefinite determiner—adjective—noun, and as a result had less tokens per condition. In order to ensure validity and reliability for our study, which (unlike Loerts’ investigation) included experiments from different populations and data acquired at different sites, we decided to test only the two structures mentioned and increase the number of tokens per structure.

  4. 4.

    A Latin Square design is a way of distributing items across subject lists, resulting in one version of a given sentence per list, and enough lists so that each version appears on one (and only one) list. The stimuli given to each participant are based on one of the lists, ensuring that s/he will see only one version of each experimental sentence.

  5. 5.

    In some systems, e.g. Biosemi, data can be recorded reference-free, but has to be referenced afterwards in order to prevent unnecessary noise in the data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Research in Language Development throughout the Lifespan (LaDeLi), Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

    Monika S. Schmid

  2. Center for Language and Cognition, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Nienke Meulman, Bregtje J. Seton & Laurie A. Stowe

Authors
  1. Nienke Meulman
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  2. Bregtje J. Seton
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  3. Laurie A. Stowe
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  4. Monika S. Schmid
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Correspondence to Nienke Meulman .

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EEG\EEG materials Dutch and German (PDF 67 kb)

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Meulman, N., Seton, B.J., Stowe, L.A., Schmid, M.S. (2016). EEG and Event-Related Brain Potentials. In: Designing Research on Bilingual Development. SpringerBriefs in Linguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11529-0_6

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