An electrophysiological investigation of translation and morphological priming in biscriptal bilinguals

Wonil Chung, Myung Kwan Park, Say Young Kim

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

The current study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether the pattern of cross-language masked translation priming reflects the asymmetric link between first language (L1) and second language (L2) and whether it occurs via morphological decomposition with unbalanced Korean-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, the targets were Korean (L1) compound words (e.g., 꿀벌, “kkwu-pel”, honeybee), and the primes were English (L2) words: either 1) translated compound words (e.g., honeybee), 2) translated constituents (e.g., bee), or 3) unrelated constituents (e.g., ear). Experiment 2 was the same as Experiment 1, except that the targets were in English (L2), and the primes were in Korean (L1). In the ERP results, the unrelated constituent primes relative to the translated compound or constituent primes produced N400 effects for both language directions (L1 to L2 and L2 to L1). In addition, the translated constituent primes relative to the translated compound primes elicited both P250 and N400 effects only in the direction of L1 to L2, suggesting translation priming via morphological decomposition. Taken together, the results indicate that both cross-language translation priming and morphological priming occur between different scripts (between non-cognate words), and that the effects are stronger when L1 primes L2 than the other way around.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)151-164
Number of pages14
JournalJournal of Neurolinguistics
Volume51
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2019

Keywords

  • Bilingual
  • Compound words
  • Cross-language activation
  • Event-related potentials
  • Masked translation priming
  • Morphological priming

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