Unskilled - English Bilingual Language Comprehension Language Switching In The Erp Study

When Bilinguals read the material which contains both Chinese words and English words, they can flexibily switch from one language to another.The cognitive and neural mechanism of the language switch of bilinguals has been studied by many researches.This paper made a further research on the base of previous achievements.A priming paradigm with masked primes,which combined with event-related potentials technolgy,was applied in the research to study the switching mechanism and swiching costs.In this study, Chinese participants who have studied English for more than eleven years montiored target words for occasional animal names,and ERPs were recorded to nonanimal words in Chinese and English primed by unrelated words from the same or the other language.In Experiment 1, the duration of Chinese primes is 30ms, the duration of English primes is 40ms. For target words in English, the language switch costs appeared in the time window of 100ms to 200ms.In Experiment 2, the duration of prime words are all 100ms, For target words in Chinese, the language switch costs appeared in N400 ERP component,with English primes generating a more negative going wave than Chinese primes. For target words in English, the language switch costs appeared in N200 ERP component and N400 ERP component,with Chinese primes generating a more negative going wave than English primes.Both experiments revealed language switching costs that depended on target langugage.