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Doctoral Project Stefanie Türk

Bimodal language processing in bilinguals: Neurophysiological and behavioural evidence of orthographic influences on spoken word recognition

The acquisition of reading changes the organization of language in the brain. This leads to automatic activation of phonological representations in the processing of written words. A recent line of research has shown that, conversely, orthographic representations are automatically activated in spoken word recognition. However, studies in this field have been limited to native speakers of deep orthographies (English, French, and Portuguese). The nature of phonological and orthographic representations and their interaction is dependent on the orthographic depth. Therefore, it remains unclear if the bimodal processing of spoken words is applicable to languages with other types of orthographies. Moreover, the majority of the world’s population is bi- or multilingual and has access to orthographic representations of different writing systems. It is not clear, how this bimodal bilingual information is represented in the mental lexicon. This poses the question, if second language learners adopt the target language’s representation and processing or if they process the second language in the same way as their native language. My research aims to accommodate the more complex reality of the bimodal bilingual brain and to extend previous findings to German, a language with a shallow orthography, and to second language learners.

Supervision:

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Domahs (University of Marburg)
Prof. Dr. Frank Domahs (University of Erfurt)