Pellikka Janne, Helenius Päivi, Mäkelä Jyrki P, Lehtonen Minna
Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Cognitive Science, Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Brain Research Unit, O.V. Lounasmaa Laboratory, and Aalto Neuroimaging, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland.
Brain Lang. 2015 Mar;142:8-17. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2015.01.006. Epub 2015 Feb 2.
How do bilinguals manage the activation levels of the two languages and prevent interference from the irrelevant language? Using magnetoencephalography, we studied the effect of context on the activation levels of languages by manipulating the composition of word lists (the probability of the languages) presented auditorily to late Finnish-English bilinguals. We first determined the upper limit time-window for semantic access, and then focused on the preceding responses during which the actual word recognition processes were assumedly ongoing. Between 300 and 500 ms in the temporal cortices (in the N400 m response) we found an asymmetric language switching effect: the responses to L1 Finnish words were affected by the presentation context unlike the responses to L2 English words. This finding suggests that the stronger language is suppressed in an L2 context, supporting models that allow auditory word recognition to be affected by contextual factors and the language system to be subject to inhibitory influence.
双语者如何管理两种语言的激活水平并防止无关语言的干扰？我们使用脑磁图技术，通过操纵以听觉方式呈现给晚期芬兰 - 英语双语者的单词列表组成（语言的概率），研究了语境对语言激活水平的影响。我们首先确定了语义通达的上限时间窗口，然后关注在此之前的反应，在此期间假定实际的单词识别过程正在进行。在颞叶皮质300到500毫秒之间（在N400 m反应中），我们发现了一种不对称的语言切换效应：对母语芬兰语单词的反应受呈现语境的影响，而对第二语言英语单词的反应则不然。这一发现表明，在第二语言语境中，较强的语言会受到抑制，这支持了那些认为听觉单词识别会受到语境因素影响且语言系统会受到抑制性影响的模型。
