Electrophysiological correlates of within- and cross-language lexical-semantic effects on the way to translation articulation

This study investigated the electrophysiological correlates of the impact of within- and cross-language lexical-semantic information on the way to forward and backward translation articulation in unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals. Participants were tasked with a bilingual flanker paradigm, in which the language congruency (congruent vs. incongruent) and semantic relatedness (i.e., semantically related vs. unrelated vs. identical) between the targets and flankers were manipulated, and the behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) data were measured to track the relative contributions of these two variables. Behavioral data revealed faster response time and higher error rate for forward than for backward translation. Additionally, bilinguals exhibited a higher error rate and slower response time for congruent than for incongruent contexts. Furthermore, ERP data revealed that both forward and backward translation processes were impacted by the cross-language (incongruent) lexical information of the semantically identical flanker words, as reflected by the modulation of the P200 (150–300 ms) component. Meanwhile, the forward and backward translation processes benefited from the semantic representation of Chinese flanker words, as reflected by less negative N400 (300–600 ms) amplitudes for semantically identical condition than for unrelated control. More importantly, the activation induced by Chinese flankers also interactively spread to the semantically related categories, as reflected by less negative N400 amplitudes for related condition than for unrelated control. Meanwhile, identical condition also elicited less negative N400 amplitudes than unrelated controls regardless of translation directions when the flankers were English words. These findings were interpreted in the framework of the Multilink model, according to which translation articulation involves both within- and cross-language lexical-semantic activation regardless of translation directions, and the above processes are modulated by language contexts.