Neural mechanisms underlying the processing of Chinese and English words in a word generation task: an event-related...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the spatiotemporal cortical activation patterns underlying Chinese and English word generation (forming a new word by adding a stroke or a letter to an old Chinese or English word) for low- and high-proficiency Chinese-English bilinguals. The results revealed that early visual perceptual processing and word identification were similar between the two languages for the N120 and P220 waveforms. However, a greater negative potential (N250-350) was associated with Chinese words than with English words between 250 and 350 ms. Subsequently, for fluent Chinese bilinguals, Chinese words elicited a more positive ERP deflection (LPC) than did English words between 350 and 800 ms. The differences in ERP components between Chinese and English words indicates that there might be a real difference in the processing demands between these languages, and that the processing of English might be affected by the proficiency of the second language.