Abstract
Silent word reading leads to the activation of orthographic (spelling), semantic (meaning), as well as phonological (sound) information. For bilinguals, native language information can also be activated automatically when they read words in their second language. For example, when Chinese-English bilinguals read words in their second language (English), the phonology of the Chinese translations is automatically activated. Chinese phonology, however, consists of consonants and vowels (segmental) and tonal information. To what extent these two aspects of Chinese phonology are activated is yet unclear. Here, we used behavioural measures, event-related potentials and oscillatory EEG to investigate Chinese segmental and tonal activation during word recognition. Evidence of Chinese segmental activation was found when bilinguals read English words (faster responses, reduced N400, gamma-band power reduction) and when they read Chinese words (increased LPC, gamma-band power reduction). In contrast, evidence for Chinese tonal activation was only found when bilinguals read Chinese words (gamma-band power increase). Together, our converging behavioural and electrophysiological evidence indicates that Chinese segmental information is activated during English word reading, whereas both segmental and tonal information are activated during Chinese word reading. Importantly, gamma-band oscillations are modulated differently by tonal and segmental activation, suggesting independent processing of Chinese tones and segments.
Highlights
Reading is a complex cognitive skill unique to humans
A reduced N400 was found in the time window from 403 to 457 ms for English word pairs with segmental repetition in their Chinese translations
Two experiments investigated the electrophysiological dynamics of Chinese segmental and tonal activation in Chinese-English bilinguals
Summary
Reading is a complex cognitive skill unique to humans. A fundamental component of this skill is the recognition of individual words. Activation of the phonology of Chinese translations was observed during a visual shape searching task when critical English words could be entirely ignored by participants[15,17] Taken together, these studies indicate that the phonology of Chinese translations is activated during English word recognition. In a Chinese semantic relatedness judgment experiment, Kong et al.[7] found a larger P200 amplitude when a Chinese character was preceded by its homophone (e.g., – , /Qian4/ – /Qain4/) Such phonological repetition in Chinese has been found to be indexed by either a P2007,13 or an N400 effect[16,18] and the phonological repetition stimuli used in the literature have so far always involved identical segments and tones. Li, et al.[19] presented in the Stroop task colour words (e.g., /Hong2/, “red”) as well as homophones of colour words
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