A neurolinguistic study of grammatical and semantic sentence processing in the native and second language of bilinguals

Language and the brain phenomenon has fascinated scientists for a long time, and the increasing number of the bilingual population in today?s world has brought up the issue of how the brain processes two languages. The age of acquisition, the proficiency level and the use of the language are known to play an important role in processing the late-learned language.The aim of this study is to investigate the grammatical and semantic processing of the two languages by Turkish-English bilinguals from a neurolinguistic perspective. Age of acquisition and proficiency level are known to play an important role in grammatical and semantic processing of the second language. This study seeks to compare grammatical and semantic processing of the second language, to reveal the differences between the grammatical processing of the native and the second language and to establish whether or not receiving education in the second language affects the processing of grammar in that language. Thirty-one subjects participated in the study and they were instructed to decide whether the sentences they heard were grammatically and semantically anomalous. The reaction times and the accuracy of their answers were recorded and statistically evaluated. According to the results of the study, no significant difference was found in reaction times in grammatical and semantic processing of the second language while the accuracy rates in the same tasks were significantly different. The study revealed that there were differences in grammatical processing of the native and the second language in terms of both reaction times and accuracy. The findings showed that receiving education in the second language had no effect on grammatical processing of that language. The results obtained in this study are thought to contribute to the fields of neurolinguistics and foreign language teaching.