The use of PsychToolbox-3 for tracking bilingual sentence processing and comprehension

The present article observes the continuous pursuit of experimental software in psycholinguistic research and the need to elaborate more on the practical use of isolated software packages. On the example of a lab-based programme MATLAB with its experiment control library PsychToolbox-3, the article offers the results of the systematic review of literature conducted in the Scopus database. The results of the review suggest that there is a lack of information about PsychToolbox-3 in MATLAB in the literature. The article further provides a comprehensive overview of the two psycholinguistic experimental studies of (i) Hungarian-English bilinguals, and (ii) Russian-English bilinguals, undertaken using PsychToolbox-3 in MATLAB. The findings reveal that similar linguistic typology maintains a positive influence on sentence comprehension, and morphosyntactic information available at a word level may alleviate the overall processing load. The authors also conclude that language proficiency plays a significant role in syntactic processing. Overall, the article illustrates that psycholinguistic experiments built on MATLAB can be administered in future studies involving bilingual populations, whereas this instrumental groundwork can emerge as one of the technology-mediated language assessment tools. Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors.