漢語和英語加工過程所誘發的N400對比

The Similarity and Difference of N400 Elicited by Chinese and English

本研究通過一個事件相關電位（ERP）實驗探討雙語表徵問題。21位漢－英並列雙語者逐詞閱讀224個漢語或英語語句，記錄其閱讀語句最後一個詞時所誘發的N400。語句最後一個詞與語句主體部分的語義關係是協調的或不協調的，其語言關係是相同的或不相同的。這樣就構成了漢、英兩種語言的語言內和語言間的語義協調和不協調的關係。通過對這些條件下目標詞所誘發的N400進行比較分析揭示，只有語義關係不同才出現不同的N400，而漢語和英語語言內和語言間的N400是高度一致的，這表明兩種語言是共同表徵的。

An event-related brain potential experiment was conducted to probe into the issue of bilingual representation. 224 sentences with the last word lexically consistent or inconsistent and semantically congruous or incongruous to the main part were presented to 21 coordinate bilinguals of Chinese and English to attain the N400 elicited by within- and between-language semantic integration. The subjects read the sentences word by word on a computer monitor without knowing the last word to appear being Chinese or English and being semantically congruous or incongruous. The ERPs elicited by the last word of each sentence was recorded and analyzed. The result suggested that Chinese and English ending words elicited highly similar N400 in both conditions of integration, indicating that the two languages shared a common semantic representation.