Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language experience influences cognition. Using behavioral and ERP measures, the present study examines whetherexperience with multiple languages can change how we form associations between concepts. Four experiments comparingbilingual and monolingual groups on semantic relatedness judgments indicate that highly proficient bilinguals perceiveconcepts as more related to one another than monolinguals. Results suggest that bilinguals denser lexical and phonologicalconnections across their two languages may shorten semantic distances between concepts. This finding is consistent withconnectionist models of language and suggests that the structure of the lexical and phonological systems may influenceconceptual level associations. We conclude that bilingualism has consequences for the structure of the language system atthe level of lexical-semantic connections.