Language-Non-Selective Lexical Activation without Its Use for Sentential Interpretation: An Event-Related Potential (ERP) Study on the Processing of L1 Chinese and L2 Japanese Sentences

An event-related potential (ERP) experiment was conducted to examine how native Chinese speakers with highly advanced Japanese language skills would process a sentence of a targeted language with no activation of an embedded word of an untargeted language. For the second language (L2) of Japanese in Experiment 1, three incorrect conditions were prepared for sentence correctness decisions: a Japanese sentence, including 1) a Chinese word (not existent in Japanese) semantically matched for the context, 2) a Chinese word (not existent in Japanese) semantically mismatched for the context, and 3) a nonword. For the first language (L1) of Chinese, sentences and target words were reversed (i.e., Chinese/Japanese respectively) for Experiment 2. The P200 peak appeared only for semantically mismatched L1 Chinese words embedded in L2 Japanese sentences compared to sentences containing a nonword. This P200 peak does not appear in the processing of L1 Chinese sentences compared to sentences containing a nonword. This result suggests extra attention to orthography is required at the early stage of processing. This reduces the activation of irrelevant information from the non-targeted language, in this case L1 Chinese. The N400 component was elicited in processing both L2 Japanese and L1 Chinese sentences with nonwords against L2 and L1 sentences with semantically matched and mismatched words of an untargeted language. These findings suggest that, regardless of whether there is a sentential semantic match in a targeted language, Chinese and Japanese bilinguals activate lexical concepts non-language-selectively. Although the nontargeted lexical concepts are non-selectively activated, they do not seem to be used for sentential interpretation for L2 Japanese and L1 Chinese.