| The mixed use of he/she in the oral context is prevalent among Chinese learners of English.To explore the cause of English pronoun gender errors made by Chinese natives,a recent study(Dong,Wen,Zeng,& Ji,2014)manipulating the conceptual gender saliency of antecedents in a self-paced reading experiment suggests that Chinese native speakers,unlike English natives,probably do not “think gender before linguistic processing”1 due to the lack of phonological encoding of biological gender in Chinese pronouns.This interesting discovery raises another intriguing question: does the difference in biological gender encoding between Chinese and English not only influence the thinking immediately prior to language formulating but also modulate “the thinking”2 in a non-linguistic context?The present study is an exploratory attempt to solve this puzzle by answering two specific research questions:1)How do Chinese-English bilinguals with different L2 proficiency perform in the perception of Chinese face gender?2)How do Chinese-English bilinguals with different L2 proficiency perform in the perception of Caucasian face gender?As shown in the questions,to operationalize “the thinking in a non-linguistic context” proposed above,face gender perception was targeted.The factor of L2 proficiency was taken as a probe whose effects on gender perception represent the possible influences of the cross-language difference in biological gender encoding.Two experiments were designed to answer the two research questions respectively.In either experiment,a passive oddball paradigm was employed together with ERP recordings.The ERP component,vMMN indexing unconscious category discrimination in perception was the focus in data analysis.The concept of age whose linguistic encoding in Chinese and English are not different was taken as the control for the gender category in face perception.Two groups of Chinese learners of English(first-year undergraduates majoring in Chinese vs.first-year postgraduates majoring in English interpreting or translation)with distinctly different L2 proficiency which was confirmed through independent samples t-tests on their self-rating scores collected through a short-versioned language history questionnaire(Li,Sepanski,& Zhao,2006)participated in the present study.Experiment 1 investigating Chinese face gender perception yielded a weak L2 proficiency effect on the vMMN elicited for the gender category(hereafter referred to as the Gender vMMN).To be specific,for the Gender vMMN which was successfully evoked in bilateral occipitotemporal regions at both 150-250 ms and300-400 ms post-stimulus intervals,only the vMMN in the left temporal region of interests(hereafter referred to as ROI)at the interval of 300-400 ms was modulated by participants’ L2 proficiency.That is,the higher the L2 proficiency was,the larger the Gender vMMN evoked in the left temporal ROI at the interval of 300-400 ms was.As to the vMMN elicited for the age category(hereafter referred to as the Age vMMN),no L2 proficiency effect was obtained.In Experiment 2 investigating Caucasian face gender perception,the Gender vMMN was not successfully elicited and the Age vMMN was evoked at narrower sites compared with that observed in the first experiment at both 150-250 ms and300-400 ms intervals.No L2 proficiency effect was found for either category.The results show that L2 proficiency had a limited modulating effect on Chinese-English bilinguals’ performance of unconscious gender discrimination in Chinese face perception while for the concept of age,there was no such effect,which implies that the difference in the linguistic encoding of biological gender between Chinese and English may impose a very weak influence on perceiving gender in the nonlinguistic context.Besides,a by-product finding was obtained that the participants’ unconscious discrimination performance for both gender and age categories changed with face race,which provides another interesting example for the “other-race effect” in face recognition. |
PDF Full Text Request