| The wholistic view of language acquisition in bilinguals proposes that the coexistence of two languages in the bilingual has produced a unique and specific speech mode, and the evaluation of speech mode is particularly important, since the degree of interference or code-switching between two languages is quite different depending on which speech mode the bilinguals have.; Since connotation is believed to be learned through social experiences, the connotative meanings of English words could be used effectively to examine the communicative abilities of bilinguals whose second language is English.; Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) have been widely used for studying language. Among the ERP components, P300 has been extensively correlated with several psychological processes. The emotional value of a stimulus has been proposed as a determining factor of P300 in addition to stimulus probability or task-relevance of a stimulus. The N200 which precedes the P300 has gained increasing attention for its possible role in extracting the information necessary for the operation of P300.; The present experiment tested the effects of emotional connotations of English words on ERPs in Korean-English becoming bilinguals, Korean-English stable bilinguals, and English-speaking monolinguals. The total number of subjects was 60, 20 for each group. The evoked potentials were measured at the electrode sites of Cz, Pz, T3, and T4.; This study found a nonsignificant emotional effect on the amplitude of P300, indicating that emotional reaction elicited by a stimulus may determine the P300 amplitude rather than the emotional sign of a stimulus per se. Even though the judgments of emotional connotations of English words were similar among the three groups, the becoming bilinguals showed the largest N200 amplitude and the longest P300 latency, indicating that English words were processed in a qualitatively different manner in becoming bilinguals. It is therefore concluded that the concurrent recording of ERP and behavioral measures can provide more information about language processing than is otherwise possible using either measure alone. |
