The Time Course For Tibetan-Mandarin Bilinguals’ Chinese Characters Production

Learning more than one language has become a mainstream trend of mutual development of modern society. Whether it’s an everyday cognition or a daily work life, second-language learning and using are very important. With the development of cognitive psychology, researchers have carried out series of in-depth researches on bilingual linguistic representation, linguistic association and processing of different languages, and bilinguals’ non-native language processing and its mechanism have become the focus in the field of bilingual speech cognition in recent years.Bilingual studies for field of second language production are rarely, especially the time course of the L2 production processing. Most researches’ hypothesis of the L2 production processing is same to the L1 production, while there are some studies found that L2 production is entirely different, so we’ll to explorer the processing.Considering there are many ethnic minorities in China and Chinese character is almost the second language for ethnic students, in this study, we will select Tibetan-Mandarin students to explore the characteristics of the ethnic students’ Chinese processing so as to improve their Chinese learning effect. Also, using behavior experiment and ERP technology with high time resolution, we examine the time course for the Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ Chinese characters production through the judgement tasks and dual-choice go/nogo task, then we try to discuss the similarities and differences between bilinguals’ L2 and L1 processing, based on which we can comb the bilinguals’ L2 research so as to provide a new perspective of bilinguals’ L2 processing mechanism.The whole research consists of two parts. In experiment 1, in order to guarantee the ERP progress, two behavior experiment was conducted to explorer the relative time course for the Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ Chinese characters production, which can also infer the possible time course of L2 production and match the task difficulty of semantic and graphic task. With the ERP technology, using LRP and N200 component, experimental 2 studied the time course of semantic and graphic information processing for the Tibetan-Chinese bilingual, in order to define the semantic and graphic information processing time.To sum up, we find that no matter which experiment, the time course for the Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ Chinese characters production is semantic first, then the graphic information. In the experiment 1, the processing of graphic judgment task actually contains the semantic processing. The ERP results indicate that the Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ production sequence of Chinese words is semantic processing first, about 164 ms earlier than the graphic processing, and the processing of graphic information is earlier than the native speakers. In detail:(1) N200 latency in the Go/nogo= semantic task was significantly earlier than the N200 latency in the Go/nogo= graphic task;(2) LRP, In Hand=semantic tasks LRP waveform is induced whether they go or nogo, however, only go trials induce the LRP waveform in Hand =graphic tasks.All in all, the present research shows that the time course for the Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ Chinese characters production is semantic information first, second the graphic information. In detail, the semantic information activation is earlier than the graphic information. We can deduce that no matter the bilinguals’ L2 production or the native speakers’ mother tongue production, the processing are similar, which is semantic processing first, followed by the graphic or the other information.These results talk about the bilingual second language processing, as well as the differences of language processing between bilinguals’ second language and the same language of the native speakers. In addition we deeply discuss the paradigm of L2 production, and found that the paradigm and the acquisition of L2 might be influence on the L2 production. In the future, we should take the dual-choice go/nogo task first and choose the picture-word inference paradigm carefully. All of these may help us to think the problem we might have in the future, and it have important pedagogical implication for bilingual teaching and teaching Chinese as second language.