Brain potentials reveal unconscious translation during foreign-language comprehension

Abstract

Whether the native language of bilingual individuals is active during second-language comprehension is the subject of lively debate. Studies of bilingualism have often used a mix of first-and second-language words, thereby creating an artificial ''dual-language'' context. Here, using event-related brain potentials, we demonstrate implicit access to the first language when bilinguals read words exclusively in their second language. Chinese-English bilinguals were required to decide whether English words presented in pairs were related in meaning or not; they were unaware of the fact that half of the words concealed a character repetition when translated into Chinese. Whereas the hidden factor failed to affect behavioral performance, it significantly modulated brain potentials in the expected direction, establishing that English words were automatically and unconsciously translated into Chinese. Critically, the same modulation was found in Chinese monolinguals reading the same words in Chinese, i.e., when Chinese character repetition was evident. Finally, we replicated this pattern of results in the auditory modality by using a listening comprehension task. These findings demonstrate that native-language activation is an unconscious correlate of second-language comprehension.bilingualism ͉ event-related potentials ͉ language access ͉ semantic priming ͉ unconscious priming S ome studies in cognitive neuroscience have suggested that fluent bilinguals can effectively inhibit their first language when accessing word meaning in their second language based on the word form (1). However, this finding conflicts with functional neuroimaging data showing overlapping cortical representation of the two languages (2, 3). A number of psycholinguistic experiments have also suggested that the two languages mastered by one individual are constantly coactivated and interactive (4-7), whereas others have provided evidence for language independence (8, 9). It therefore remains an open question whether or not bilingual individuals can effectively suppress all interference from their first language when processing their second language (10).Previous studies have made extensive use of cross-language priming (6, 9, 11) or overt translation tasks (12, 13) to compare native-and second-language activation in bilinguals. For example, reaction time is reduced in French-English bilinguals when the English word money is presented after the French word coin ''corner'' relative to when it is presented after feuille ''leaf.'' However, mixing stimuli from two languages creates an artificial context that necessarily biases the output of behavioral tests toward a bilingual or ''dual-language'' activation pattern (14). For that matter, translation tasks are even more biased because they require conscious access to both languages. In fact, any experiment mixing stimuli from two languages or using interlingual homographs is likely to activate both languages, even if native-language activation is not automatic during everyday second-language comprehensio...

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