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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Speech and Language
Volume 18 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1270377

Lexical Pathway from L2 to L1 Activation in Intermediate Proficient Bilinguals: Behavioral and ERP Evidence Provisionally Accepted

Siqin Yang1 Siyi Jiang2* Minghu Jiang3* Qian Guo4 Roger Olesen4
  • 1Faculty of Humanities, Renmin University of China, China
  • 2Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, China
  • 3School of Humanities, Tsinghua University, China
  • 4Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, School of Humanities, Tsinghua University, China

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Numerous studies have demonstrated that second language (L2) comprehension is often accompanied by activations in the first language (L1). Using both behavioral measurement and event-related potential (ERP), this study conducted two experiments to investigate whether a direct activation pathway exists from L2 lexical representation to L1 lexical representation (the lexical pathway) in intermediate proficient bilinguals. In Experiment 1, we designed a vowel letter search task on English word pairs, which enables bilinguals to prevent semantic priming in the first 300 ms processing stage after the words' onset. In Experiment 2, Mandarin-English bilinguals were recruited to complete this task on English word pairs with occasional first character repetition between the Chinese counterparts of a word pair. Results showed a significant main effect within both the P200 and N400 time windows, indicating the activation of bilinguals' L1 lexical representation during these intervals. However, the main effect of semantic relatedness was only significant in the N400 time window. These results suggest that bilinguals can activate their L1 lexical representation directly before engaging in conceptual representation. This finding supported a lexical pathway of activation from L2 to L1 lexical representation during visual-word recognition in intermediate proficient bilinguals.

Keywords: Bilingual 1, Cross-language 2, Activation 3, Visual-word Recognition 4, Pathway 5, Mandarin-English 6

Received: 31 Jul 2023; Accepted: 12 Feb 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Yang, Jiang, Jiang, Guo and Olesen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
Dr. Siyi Jiang, Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China
Prof. Minghu Jiang, School of Humanities, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100083, Beijing, China