Unskilled - Bilingual Language Control And Conversion Of The Erp Study

Bilingual speakers show remarkable flexibility in their ability to control their language output according to different settings. They can restrict their speech to one language only but also switch between languages flexibly. Psycholinguists has made a great deal researches in this field and proposed different theories about mechanism of lexical access in bilingual speech production. This paper made a further research about unbalanced Chinese-English bilingual speakers on the base of previous achievements.Picture-naming and picture-word interference paradigm, which combined with ERP Technology, was applied in this research to study the switching cost, switching effect, the context effect, and interference effect of semantic-related interference word in different conditions. In this study, subjects were asked to classify according to the pronunciation of the pictures' name.The present study indicated that in bilingual context, RTs obtained in the condition with interference were slower than those without interference; RTs of L1 and L2 obtained under nonswitching condition were faster than those under switching condition; there was no difference in RTs between L1 and L2 under nonswitching condition; under switching condition, however, RTs of L2 were faster than those of L1 and the switching cost was asymmetric; the ERPs analysis showed that the interference effect in switching trials was significant between 170ms and 220ms and switching effect significant in L1 trials between 260ms and 360ms, 360ms and 460ms .According to the analysis on nonswitching trials in monolingual context and bilingual context, RTs obtained in bilingual context were much slower than monolingual context; RTs obtained under the condition without interference were faster than the condition with interference; there was no difference in RTs between L1 and L2. The interference effect was significant in the time window of 100ms to 200ms and 250ms to 350ms. The context effect is significant in the time window of 100ms to 200ms and 550ms to 800ms.The present study showed that the interference effect occurred later in switching condition than nonswitching condition.