Dr Mohammad MOMENIAN, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

Predictive Language Processing in Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers. International Symposium on Bilingualism and Cognition. Cognitive Neuroscience Lab and the Center for Neural and Cognitive Sciences (CNCS), University of Hyderabad, Goa, India, 28-29 October 2022.

Abstract
Our brain is a statistical organ that constantly generates predictions about what will happen next. Language processing benefits from this property, the brain is using the previous sequence of words to actively predict what word will come next. Here, we used a naturalistic story in Persian to study whether predictive processing could be different between competent monolingual and bilingual speakers. We assessed regression ERPs using Unfold toolbox. We extracted word properties such as entropy, surprisal, word frequency, and word neighbourhood density from a GPT2 language model in Persian. Using Bayesian mixed effects modelling, we found that regression ERPs for entropy and surprisal differed between monolingual and bilingual speakers. Using a naturalistic task, we show how the temporal dynamics of predictive processing may be affected by bilingualism.