Linnaeus University Language Processing Lab (LiLa Lab)

Thanks to funding from the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation for the Peanut project, the LiLa lab has, since summer 2020, a new mobile EEG system (Brain Product's actiCAP). Using EEG (electroencephalography), we can now measure the brain's processing of an auditory or visually presented language online, millisecond by millisecond.

With EEG, we can record brain oscillations or brain activity at a specific event (event-related potential, ERP). Since the recording does not require a response, we can compare groups that typically differ in how well they perform in conventional language tests (for example, adults and children, first- and second-language speakers, and so on).

The figure shows differences in how the brain processes the Swedish word order (V2) depending on the language background (Swedish, German, or English native speaker). Participants in the study read correctly formed V2 sentences Idag på morgonen ringde hon till sin pappa lit. ‘Today in the morning called she her father’ or incorrectly formed sentences with the verb following the subject *Idag på eftermiddagen han sov i gräset lit. ‘Today in the afternoon he slept in the grass’. While German and English learners of Swedish did not differ on the language tests, we were able to demonstrate the importance of the first language for processing a second language (Andersson, Sayehli, & Gullberg, 2019).

Our mobile eye-tracker, Tobii Pro Spectrum, can be used in interdisciplinary studies that can utilize information about participants' eye movements or focus – over a text, image or web page. The movement of the eyes is taken as an indication of the individual's focus. The visual world paradigm is a study design that is particularly suitable for studying language processing. Here, auditory and visual stimuli are presented together. This allows conclusions about the participants' processing and understanding of, for example, word meanings, negatives and emphasis patterns.

An example of the paradigm and how eye movements can be interpreted: in this study, the participant listened to sentences that emphasized the color or the object in the statements, for example where is the yellow boat? The child had six objects in different colors to look at. The child in the example looked most closely at the boats when they were given the following two questions in succession: Where is the green boat? And where is the yellow boat? The fact that the child did not look at the yellow cap, which was one of the six objects, indicated that the child had interpreted the emphasis on yellow correctly.

With a response box, we can measure the reaction time for processing different phenomena. As an example, we can present different words in a second language that belong to or does not belong to a semantic category (for example, animals). Participants press a green or red button depending on whether the word presented is an animal or not. By allowing a few words to have common phonology with first-language words that either are or are not animals, we can use RT to show whether both languages are activated in a second-language task. This is just one example to show how a simple RT study can answer big questions.

The lab provides a selection of microphones, mobile audio recording equipment, and camcorders for a variety of purposes. These include recordings of (group) conversations as well as recordings of individual speakers and dialogues with good channel separation, to enable acoustic-phonetic analysis.