Non-Target Language Processing in Chinese-English Bilinguals: A Study of Event-Related Potential

Abstract

The event-related brain potential (ERP) technique was used to investigate the neural mechanism of non-target language processing in Chinese-English bilinguals. Participants were presented with a mixed list of Chinese and English words and required to make conceptual decisions for words in one language and ignore words in the other non-target language. Regardless of whether the nontarget word was in Chinese or English, the ERPs they elicited were modulated by word frequency, suggesting that their meaning had been accessed. The N400 peak was delayed in the English as the non-target language condition, probably because participants were less proficient in English. The results suggest that the non-target language can be processed during conceptual tasks with participants' proficiency in this language being a critical factor.

Bilingual Memory Representations in Less Fluent Chinese–English Bilinguals: An Event-Related Potential Study

“…Three factors (translation order, word familiarity, and repetition status) were manipulated in this study, and the major dependent variable was the magnitude of the N400 repetition eff ect, which is related to semantic expectation and is an important physiological index of language processing. The results confi rmed the asymmetry in bilingual memory with stronger L2-LI links compared to L1-L2 links in less fl uent Chinese-English bilinguals, and that word familiarity was an important factor in the memory representations of these less fl uent bilinguals.A challenge to psychologists is to determine how two languages are remembered and organized by bilinguals ( Li, Mo, Wang, Luo, & Chen, 2009 ;Li, Fan, Sun, Wang, Mo, & Zhang, 2012 ). There are three classical models of bilingual memory representations: the Word Association Model, the Concept Mediation Model, and the Revised Hierarchical Model ( Potter, So, Von Eckardt, & Feldman, 1984 ;Kroll & Curley, 1988 ).…”

“…A challenge to psychologists is to determine how two languages are remembered and organized by bilinguals ( Li, Mo, Wang, Luo, & Chen, 2009 ;Li, Fan, Sun, Wang, Mo, & Zhang, 2012 ). There are three classical models of bilingual memory representations: the Word Association Model, the Concept Mediation Model, and the Revised Hierarchical Model ( Potter, So, Von Eckardt, & Feldman, 1984 ;Kroll & Curley, 1988 ).…”