An ERP Study On The Language Comprehension Switching Of Less-proficient Mandarin-cantonese Bidialectals

Bilingual comprehension switching refers to the process by which bilinguals perform processing of comprehension in two language materials.In this process,bilinguals can effectively understand the current language(target language)and minimize the impact of another language(non-target language)on it,this internal processing mechanism is a hot topic in the field of bilingualism in recent years.However,in China,the phenomenon of bidialectals is more common than bilingualism.At present,research at home and abroad mainly revolves around Indo-European languages or cross-language languages.There are few reports on the comprehension switching of the two dialects of the Sino-Tibetan language.Therefore,this study uses the ERP technology combined with the immediate cross-language priming paradigm,which through two experiments to explore the mechanism of language switching of less-proficient Mandarin-Cantonese bidialectals on the visual and auditory channels,and examines the effect of similarity of morphemes on the processing process.In experiment 1,by presenting visual materials,the response time and N400 as main measurement indicators to analysis semantic priming effect of primes on targets in different language switching directions.The results show that whether the transition from Cantonese(less-proficient language)to Mandarin(proficient language)or Mandarin to Cantonese,the primes will promote the recognition of targets when there are semantic correlations between the two languages which as primes and targets respectively.Non-target language semantics are automatically activated,mainly compared with semantically unrelated word-pairs,participants' response time to semantic-related word-pairs is shorter,and the negative N400 wave is smaller.Moreover,when the words form of Cantonese and Mandarin are the same,there is no significant difference in the starting amount under the two conversion directions.However,when the two words form are different,the primes of Cantonese to start Mandarin is significantly larger than that of Mandarin to start Cantonese.In experiment 2,the auditory materials were presented in the same way.The results also showed that under both switching directions,the participants showed the semantic priming effect of the paired words,the processing time of semantic-related words was longer,and resulting in an N400 tend to be more negative and more huger.However,the priming effect under the auditory pathway did not affect by the form of word spelling.Regardless of whether Cantonese and Mandarin were homomorphic,there was no significant difference in the starting amount under the two switching directions.Based on the above two experimental results,this study found:(1)Whether the non-target language is Mandarin(proficient language)or Cantonese(less-proficient language),the semantic information of non-target language will be automatically activated when target language access to semantic of the less-proficient Mandarin-Cantonese bidialectals,the results support the Non-target language activation theory.(2)Morphological similarity plays an important role in the comprehension switching of less-proficient bidialectals on the visual channel.When the word forms are the same,the priming effect is symmetrical in different switching directions.However,when the word forms are different,the priming amount of Cantonese to Mandarin is larger than the Mandarin to Cantonese,and partly conforms to the revised hierarchical model(RHM).(3)No matter whether Cantonese was started in Mandarin or Mandarin was started in Cantonese,the priming effects on the auditory channels of less-proficient Mandarin-Cantonese bidialectals were both symmetric.The speech characterization of Cantonese(less-proficient language)can directly reach the concept,indicating that the connection of internal language characterization which Mandarin-Cantonese bidialectals had is not the same as bilingual.