Reading Shakespearean tropes in a foreign tongue: Age of L2 acquisition modulates neural responses to functional shifts

MIKULAN, EZEQUIEL; MANES, FACUNDO; SANTILLI, MICAELA; IBÁÑEZ, AGUSTÍN; MARTORELL CARO, MIGUEL; SEDEÑO, LUCAS; VILAS, MARTINA G.; ADOLFI, FEDERICO; HERRERA, EDUAR; GARCÍA, ADOLFO M.

NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Año: 2019 vol. 124 p. 79 - 86

0028-3932

Functional shifts (FSs) ? morphosyntactically marked words evoking coherent but novel meanings ? are ubiquitous in English and, specially, in Shakespearean literature. While their neural signatures have been explored in native speakers, no study has targeted foreign-language users, let alone comparing early and late bilinguals. Here, we administered a validated FS paradigm to subjects from both populations and evaluated time-frequency modulations evoked by FS and control sentences. Early bilinguals exhibited greater sensitivity towards FSs, indexed by reduced fronto-posterior theta-band oscillations across semantic- and structural-integration windows. Such oscillatory modulations may represent a key marker of age-of-acquisition effects during foreign-language wordplay processing.