| Whether bilinguals automatically activate the non-target language when using the target language is a long-standing topic for bilingual processing research.Mounting evidence has been obtained supporting non-selective lexical access.That is,the first language(L1)representations are simultaneously accessed during second language(L2)reading,listening,and speaking.However,few of prior work emphasized the role of emotion,thereby leading to the largely overlooked influences of emotional information on bilingual lexical access.Wu and Thierry(2012)addressed this question by using the implicit translation priming paradigm and manipulating the emotional valence of prime words.They revealed an inhibitory mechanism triggered in the translation process when prime words are negative,indexed by the absence of N400 modulation in this condition whereas N400 amplitudes reduced for word pairs primed by positive or neutral words.Nevertheless,it remains unknown when the inhibitory mechanism is triggered(i.e.,before or after access to L1 translations of negative words).Regarding this question,one interpretation is that bilinguals shut down their non-selective lexical access to L1 immediately upon encountering a negative word.Then,the prime’s translation is not accessed,thus failing to prime the target word.Another hypothesis is that access to translation equivalents from the prime occurs in all cases,irrespective of the prime’s valence,that is,the abortion of priming effects by negative valence originates from inhibition after translation of negative primes.The present study,therefore,aims to test the two hypotheses and to further elucidate the inhibitory mechanism of emotion on automatic L1 translation in L2 lexical processing,We used event-related potentials(ERPs)with high temporal resolution to first replicate negative valence induced suppression of L1 translations when reading words in L2 and more importantly investigate whether the suppression mechanism initiates its action after rather than before a negative word is unconsciously translated.We engaged24 late Chinese-English bilinguals in the implicit translation–priming paradigm in which they were asked to decide whether pairs of words(prime and target words)presented in English were related in meaning.Some of the word pairs hid a sound repetition if translated into Chinese.Pairs having neither semantic relatedness nor sound repetition were used as a control condition.Presentation of emotional(positive,neutral,and negative)words was manipulated such that they were primes in half of the trials and targets in the other half.The mean amplitudes of N400 significantly reduced in response to positively-and neutrally-primed words as compared to those in the unrelated control condition,which replicated previous findings and suggested that the bilingual brain detected the hidden repetition in the Chinese translations of the word pairs and displayed priming effects.In contrast,we did not observe the priming effect when primes were negative.Importantly,we revealed that when emotional words were targets priming effects occurred and did not differ in all conditions regardless of valence,suggesting that negative valence of words in L2 triggers the inhibition of unconscious access to L1 after,rather than before,negative words are translated.On the one hand,this study provides confirmation for the non-selective language access in bilinguals and the modulation of this process by emotion.On the other hand,the findings shed light on the mechanism of valence-dependent inhibition of spontaneous L1 access when reading in L2. |
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