Presentation
Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions | Lightning Talks
An ERP Study of Chinese-English Bilingual Sub-Lexical Processing
Poster C21 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Yihan Chen1, Eleonora Rossi1; 1University of Florida
Previous studies have shown that bilinguals activate both of their languages in a non-selective manner. This co-activation is involuntary, which means that they cannot effectively inhibit one language while processing words in the other language (Thierry & Wu, 2007). However, whether this co-activation can extend to the sub-lexical level is still a subject of debate (Chen & Perfetti, 2021). In this study, we used both behavioral and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to test sub-lexical processing in Chinese-English bilinguals. Thirty-three bilingual participants completed an EEG-based semantic relatedness task during which they were asked to judge whether pairs of English words were related in meaning or not. A 2x2 design was used. In one of the manipulated factors, half of the word pairs were related in meaning (e.g., +S: dog-cat), and half of the items were unrelated (e.g., -S: dog-roof). In the other manipulated factor, the Chinese translations of half of the pairs shared a sub-lexical (semantic) radical in form(+F) (e.g., 氵 is a semantic radical in Chinese which means ‘water’), and half of the pairs did not share a sub-lexical radical(-F). Altogether, there were four conditions: +S+F river ‘河’, +S-F rain ‘雨’, -S+F law ‘法’, and -S-F hand ‘手’. The behavioral results showed that participants had a shorter reaction time with semantic related word pairs. Accuracy, on the other hand, suggested an impact of hidden Chinese radicals: pairs with unrelated radicals in Chinese resulted in significantly higher accuracy than pairs with related radicals. The ERPs results revealed a main effect of semanticity, with a larger N400 found in semantic unrelated word pairs. Critically, independently of semanticity, there was an effect of the hidden radical manipulation: words that shared related radicals in Chinese elicited a reduced P200 compared with words that did not share. These findings demonstrate that native-language activation is automatic for bilinguals even when the L1 is not explicitly activated by the paradigm. Critically, this activation extends to the sub-lexical level. Testing of a matched group of monolingual English speakers is underway and so far, 12 participants have been collected. Their preliminary ERP results showed a main effect at the N400 time window but no effect at the P200 time window. This corresponds to our prediction that monolingual English speakers will only show sensitivity to semanticity, but not to the hidden Chinese radical manipulation.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Meaning: Lexical Semantics