ERP Study On Cross-Language Priming Effects In Sentence Comprehension By Chinese-English Bilinguals

As one of the most important components for second language learning, sentence comprehension has always been taken as the research focus in the field of cross-language study. Second language learners can benefit a lot through getting a thorough understanding of sentence comprehension process. Cross-language priming has been used as a popular method of testing issues related to second language memory representation, and it was described through the facilitation in the response time and response accuracy of comprehending components in one language due to the translation equivalents from another language. Cross language priming research mainly focused on word or phrase level, and has been mostly demonstrated in lexicon recognition or naming tasks. Chinese and English are respectively belong to Sino-Tibetan language family and Indo-European language family. By providing some Chinese primes during the process of English sentence comprehension, the present study is to investigate how word meaning primes of Chinese facilitate the understanding of English sentences for Chinese-English bilinguals. With pairwise comparisons among the four conditions (early primed; late primed; both early and late primed; unprimed), detailed instrumental effects were revealed through the analysis. Also, the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal was recorded during the whole experiment to investigate the neural mechanisms difference among conditions.The behavioral result indicated that, for Chinese-English bilinguals, it would take much longer response time and have much lower response accuracy under unprimed conditions. And among the primed conditions, the instrumental effects of early primed condition are larger than late primed condition, while both early and late primed conditions being larger than one word primed conditions. And these results partially supported conclusions from researches on same language families, and were in consistent with previous researchers'study on second language speech comprehension. The analysis of ERP data showed that primed and unprimed conditions were quite different in neural processing. And under different time windows, the amplitudes of N150 and N400 components were captured to be larger for unprimed conditions than for the rest three primed conditions. This was mostly on the side of previous researches on the lexicon level, while at the same time presenting some unique results from the perspective of sentence level.