Thierry Guillaume, Wu Yan Jing
Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice, University of Wales, Bangor LL57 2DG, United Kingdom.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Jul 24;104(30):12530-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0609927104. Epub 2007 Jul 13.
Whether the native language of bilingual individuals is active during second-language comprehension is the subject of lively debate. Studies of bilingualism have often used a mix of first- and second-language words, thereby creating an artificial "dual-language" context. Here, using event-related brain potentials, we demonstrate implicit access to the first language when bilinguals read words exclusively in their second language. Chinese-English bilinguals were required to decide whether English words presented in pairs were related in meaning or not; they were unaware of the fact that half of the words concealed a character repetition when translated into Chinese. Whereas the hidden factor failed to affect behavioral performance, it significantly modulated brain potentials in the expected direction, establishing that English words were automatically and unconsciously translated into Chinese. Critically, the same modulation was found in Chinese monolinguals reading the same words in Chinese, i.e., when Chinese character repetition was evident. Finally, we replicated this pattern of results in the auditory modality by using a listening comprehension task. These findings demonstrate that native-language activation is an unconscious correlate of second-language comprehension.
双语者的母语在第二语言理解过程中是否处于活跃状态是一个激烈争论的话题。双语研究通常会混合使用第一语言和第二语言的词汇，从而营造出一种人为的“双语”语境。在此，我们利用事件相关脑电位，证明了双语者在仅阅读其第二语言的单词时，会隐性地激活第一语言。要求汉英双语者判断成对呈现的英语单词在意义上是否相关；他们并未意识到，一半的单词在翻译成中文时隐藏着一个汉字重复。虽然这个隐藏因素并未影响行为表现，但它却在预期的方向上显著调节了脑电位，表明英语单词会自动且无意识地被翻译成中文。至关重要的是，在阅读相同中文单词的汉语单语者中也发现了相同的调节，也就是说，当汉字重复明显时。最后，我们通过听力理解任务在听觉模态中复制了这种结果模式。这些发现表明，母语激活是第二语言理解的无意识关联。
