Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Brain Lang. 2012 Jan;120(1):61-5. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2011.10.003. Epub 2011 Oct 22.
Bilingual speakers generally manifest slower word recognition than monolinguals. We investigated the consequences of the word processing speed on semantic access in bilinguals. The paradigm involved a stream of English words and pseudowords presented in succession at a constant rate. English-Welsh bilinguals and English monolinguals were asked to count the number of letters in pseudowords and actively disregard words. They were not explicitly told that pairs of words in immediate succession were embedded and could either be semantically related or not. We expected that slower word processing in bilinguals would result in semantic access indexed by semantic priming. As expected, bilinguals showed significant semantic priming, indexed by an N400 modulation, whilst monolinguals did not. Moreover, bilinguals were slower in performing the task. The results suggest that bilinguals cannot discriminate between pseudowords and words without accessing semantic information whereas monolinguals can dismiss English words on the basis of subsemantic information.
双语者通常表现出比单语者更慢的单词识别速度。我们研究了单词处理速度对双语者语义访问的影响。该范式涉及一连串以恒定速度连续呈现的英语单词和假词。我们要求英语-威尔士双语者和英语单语者数假词的字母数，并主动忽略单词。他们没有被告知紧接着的单词对是嵌入的，并且可以是语义相关的，也可以是不相关的。我们预计双语者较慢的单词处理速度会导致语义启动索引的语义访问。正如预期的那样，双语者表现出显著的语义启动，表现为 N400 调制，而单语者则没有。此外，双语者在完成任务时较慢。结果表明，双语者无法在不访问语义信息的情况下区分假词和单词，而单语者可以根据亚语义信息忽略英语单词。
