Abstract
Translation equivalents for cognates in different script systems share the same meaning and phonological similarity but are different orthographically. Event-related potentials were recorded during the visual recognition of cross-script cognates and non-cognates together with concreteness factors while Chinese learners of English performed a lexical decision task with the masked translation priming paradigm in Experiment 1 (forward translation: L1–L2) and Experiment 2 (backward translation: L2–L1). N400 effect was found to be closely related to priming effects of cross-script cognate status and concreteness in Experiment 1; and in Experiment 2, N150 and N400 effects were related to priming effects of cross-script cognate status and concreteness, and greater priming effects of cross-script cognate status in cognates than in non-cognates for abstract words were found in the time window of 100–200 ms. Meanwhile, the asymmetry of translation directions was observed in smaller priming effects in forward translation than in backward translation in the time window of 100–200 ms for abstract cognates, and in larger priming effects in forward translation than in backward translation in the time window of 350–550 ms for each type of words. We discussed the roles of phonological activation and concreteness effects in view of the function of N150 and N400 components as well as the relevant models, mainly the Distributed Feature Model and Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) model.
Highlights
In the domain of psycholinguistic research on bilingualism, endeavors have been taken to answer the question of whether lexical representations from both languages are simultaneously activated during the processing of the word input
The entire data of three participants were excluded from analyses in forward translation due to higher error rates in behavioral and ERP analyses
In the present study, priming effects of cognate status were observed in the N150 in backward translation, and greater priming effects of cross-script cognate status in cognates than in non-cognates for abstract words were found in the time window of 100–200 ms in backward translation
Summary
In the domain of psycholinguistic research on bilingualism, endeavors have been taken to answer the question of whether lexical representations from both languages are simultaneously activated during the processing of the word input. The Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM, Kroll and Stewart, 1994) assumes that the meaning of L2 words is accessed through their L1 translation equivalents, and with the improvement of second language proficiency, L2 words can directly be accessed without the assistance of L1, indicating that L1 and L2 shared a common conceptual system. The models mentioned above can to some extent explain the empirical data obtained by using different paradigms and experimental tasks, they failed to give a detailed description of the processing of word identification, from the onset of a word to the time when it is accessed Language retrieval models such as the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) model (Dijkstra and van Heuven, 2002) are implemented in the studies of bilingual memory to describe the processing of word identification. The fact that so many theoretical models are proposed to account for the processing and representation of mental lexicon leads to many experiments conducted to investigate variables that can modulate the recognition of L1 and L2 words, including word type (cognates and non-cognates), concreteness and translation direction (Ferré et al, 2017)
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