The Yi-Chinese Bilinguals Chinese Processing Mode And Bilingual Semantic Representation:an ERP Study

Minority Students in China are generally proficient in two language, their native language and Chinese. The study of bilingualism has always been an important area of research in psychology, and the Cognitive characteristics of the language specked by the minority bilinguals are getting more and more attention of psychologists. The existing research focuses on minority bilingual study involved three minorities, which are Uighurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians. The study includes bilingual representation, language contact, language understanding, and speech processing characteristics. Although these studies have gained a preliminary achievement, it is far from enough since they failed to reach other minorities. China is a country with rich and diverse languages, however, most of them have not been applied due attention.The concern for psychological studies on the bilingualism of bicultural minority, under one regime, is a unique investigation and discussion of minority bilinguals in the circumstances having a comparatively great cultural integration as well as maintaining the particular characteristics of different cultures and languages. Minority bilingual study is different from the study of the single culture bilinguals’ bilingual representation. The study on minority bilingual not only serves as a supplement but also provides an extra dimension to the study of bilingualism. Moreover, it offers psychological guidance on minority mother-tongue teaching and Chinese language teaching.Yi is one of China’s minorities, which has a national population of800million, approximately. It is mainly distributed in provinces such as Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou. Yi language belongs to the Yi branch of the Burma Tibetan family to Sino-Tibetan language family. There is a relatively big discrepancy in dialects of Yi due to the wide distribution of the population. According to the survey, Yi language can be divided into six major dialects:Eastern dialects presented by Weining, Guizhou, Xundian, Yunnan, and the Luquan Yi; the Nan Shi Ping Yi southern dialect; Yiliang, Yunnan, Maitreya Yi southeastern dialects; western dialects presented by Weishan County, Yunnan Yi; the central dialect presented by Dayao Yi and Liangshan Yi northern dialect.The number of Skilled (including listening, speaking, reading and writing) Yi is decreasing. Most of Yi native language speakers only retain proficient listening and speaking ability and lose the ability to read and write Yi. This situation is contributed by the social history of the Yi. Yi literacy concludes two kinds of people:one is Bimo, the other is the modern Yi language learning researchers, including national language professional students and teachers. This objective condition of Yi language usage limits the likelihood of depth research in Yi character. The limited number of Bimo Yi learner causes great difficulty in recruiting participants for our experiments. The survey found that most students were eligible only for listening task of Yi. Consequently, the methods of our study were adjusted to adapt the situation. The present study chose Sichuan Liangshan Yi students as subjects. To ensure commonality of language studies, they maintain a skilled listening and speaking ability of Yi language.This study used event-related potentials technology to explore the Yi Language mode and Chinese processing mode semantic representation of Yi-Chinese bilingual. Experiment by visually presented word-by-word rendering sentence stimuli on both semantic match and mismatch conditions induced N400wave study on the Yi-Chinese bilingual Chinese processing mode. The results show that, Yi-Chinese bilingual Chinese processing mode is similar to Chinese monolingual processing mode which was left hemisphere lateralization advantage. The significant test of two hemispheres difference waves found that frontal, central area, temporal differences were statistically significant. The Semantic matching and non-matching relationship between Yi Han culture images with different target language (Yi and Chinese) is formed in second experiment. The above prime condition is realized through the visual representation and the target language is realized through aural rendering. N400difference wave analysis shows that the semantics of the two languages of bilinguals is independent characterization.