An ERP Study Of The Sources Of Language Switching Costs In Chinese-English Bilinguals

Recently, the study on the switching mechanism of two languages of bilinguals hasbecome a hot issue of bilingual research. Currently, the related studies are mainly based onIndo-European languages; few studies are based on Chinese. Besides, many related studiesare conducted by the method of picture naming and lexical judgment, which does not havecontext and semantic restriction.The ERPs experiments were conducted in our study to explore the time course oflanguage switching in idiomatic context and non-idiomatic context, to investigate the effectsof contextual constraints (different degrees of semantic constraints) on the processing oflanguage switching. Moreover, we analyze relative language components of ERPs, on thisbasis; we explore the sources of language switching costs of Chinese-English Bilinguals.Through the experiment, we analyzed and discussed some conclusion as follows:Firstly,we find that language switching costs do exist, by the behavioral data and ERPscomponents of sentences with language switching and sentences without language switching.Besides, comparing the sentences in idiomatic context and non-idiomatic context leads us tothe point that the contextual constraint is quite important to the processing of languageswitching, with the fact that the differences between two contexts are certainly obvious.Secondly,based on the analysis and discussion of N1、N400and LPC components, wefind the costs are not only incurred during the process of word recognition and the process oflexical and semantic integration, which are relevant to the bilingual mental lexicon, but alsoincurred later in decision-making stages. These experimental results validate the IC Modeland apply to language-unspecific selection theory of bilingual word selection.