Proficiency And Language Similar To The Second Language In Bilingual Syntactic Processing Erp Studies

While there is ample evidence on lexical-semantic processing in bilingual language studies, the research and evidence on L2 syntactic processing is sparse. Previous research primarily concerned with age of acquisition, proficiency and transfer of L2 and their roles in L2 syntactic acquisition and processing. However, most of the studies focused on the western languages and bilinguals. Chinese is constitutionally different from western language in syntax with its own characteristics. Therefore, Chinese-English bilinguals deserve more thoroughly investigation. The current ERP research examined late AOA Chinese-English bilinguals with two systematic experiments. In the first experiment, the proficiency of Chinese-English bilinguals was manipulated to explore the interaction between L2 proficiency and L2 syntactic processing. The second experiment was focused on the LI language transfer influence on the L2 syntactic processing. Two experiments clearly showed:(1) In the first experiment, the electrophysiological correlates were investigated when differently proficient Chinese-English bilinguals processed the syntactic anomaly in English garden-path sentences. High proficient bilinguals evoked P600 which is considered as the index of syntactic revision while low proficient bilinguals were lack of such a component. The L2 proficiency was proved to positively impact L2 syntactic processing despite the late AOA and the critical period is not the determinant of L2 syntactic processing.(2) In the second experiment, the high proficient bilinguals showed different ERP patterns when processing the English syntactic anomalies with certain similarity or dissimilarity with Chinese syntax. While tense anomaly which is considered to share similar syntactic concept with Chinese evoked P600, the subject-verb agreement anomaly which is considered as a characteristic syntactic phenomenon in English showed an N400-P600 bi-phase ERP pattern. The results showed that the transfer of language similarity leads to different L2 language processing mechanism.