Within- and cross-modal translation priming: An event-related potential investigation with Chinese-English bilinguals

Abstract

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate and compare the temporal dynamics of cross-linguistic lexical-semantic activation during English written and spoken word recognition in unbalanced Chinese (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals. Participants were tested in a L1-L2 translation recognition task, where L1 words were visually presented and L2 words were visually or auditorily presented. The ERP results revealed that, relative to the non-translation equivalents, the translation equivalents elicited a more negative N200 amplitude (100–300 ms, i.e., N200 enhancement effect) regardless of modalities. Furthermore, the ERP translation priming effects (i.e., less negative or more positive ERP waveforms) were observed in the 300-600-ms time period for within-modal presentation and 400-1000-ms time period for cross-modal presentation. The early N200 enhancement effects reflected a cross-linguistic whole-word orthographic activation during L2 written and spoken word processing and demonstrated a bidirectional interactive link between the L1 and L2 lexical representations, which was not modulated by the change of processing modality. The late ERP priming effects reflected the cross-linguistic lexical-semantic activation and integration processes at later stages. Additionally, the lexical-semantic link of within-modal L1-L2 word pairs was more robust than that of cross-modal pairs, as reflected by larger ERP priming effects in the typical N400 time period (300–500 ms). In contrast, bilinguals might need additional cognitive resources to integrate the lexical-semantic information of cross-modal word pairs, as reflected by larger ERP priming effects in the LPC time period (600–900 ms).