Language Presentation And Language Switching Effects Of Less Proficient Mogolian-english Bilinguals: An ERPs Study

In recent years, many people learn two or more languages in order to adapt the development of modern society. With the development of this group, researchers are interested in bilingual and multilingual, they studies deeply and widely. Those researches mainly focus on semantic representation of two or more languages and switch among languages. In minority area, minority nationalities not only master their native language and Chinese that is their essential communication tool, but also learn other languages, such as English, Japanese, Russian and so on. According to these, they become multilingual. Thus, studying on them will develop the theory of bilingual representation and switching.In the first and second experiments of this research, using cross-language repetition priming the author explores the lexical and conceptual representation model of the non-proficient bilingual Mongolians. To study the priming effect of Mongolian and English under various conditions, priming paradigm is used in the third experiment, combining with event-related potential technology in which N4 is studied in the research. In the forth experiment, we make a research on time-course characteristics of switching schedule between English and Mongolian using event-related potential technology with N2 component as the index.1. The memory representation model of the non-proficient bilingual Mongolians is that the conceptual representations are shared and lexical representations are separate.2. The priming effects of within and between two languages are both significant and there is the asymmetry between them that L1-L2 is greater than L2-L1. Semantic priming effects are significant. And the reaction to Mongolian is faster than English in all semantic relations. According to the analysis of N4 component, a significant priming effect is found and the amplitude of the Mongolian is significantly greater than that of English under the same-language priming condition. The results also show significant semantic priming effect in these two priming conditions. Under the semantics unrelated and translation conditions, the amplitude of the same-language priming is greater than the cross-language priming.3. According to the behavioral data, Mongolian is significant faster than English under the non-switching condition and the correct rates of reaction of Mongolian show significant differences in switching types. But there is no difference between them in switching conditions. The analysis of the average amplitude of N2 appears that English has significant differences in switching types and the switching cost of English is larger than that of Mongolian.The results show that non-proficient Mongolian-English bilingual memory representation is that conceptual representation is shared and lexical representation is separate. The asymmetry between priming direction indicates that the second language of non-proficient bilingual must connected with the lexical representation of native language in order to access concept. The result supports RHM model. In the switching mechanism of bilingual Mongolian, there is switch code between them that the switch code of English is greater than Mongolian. The result supports BIA model.