The masked translation priming paradigm has been widely used in the last 25 years to investigate word processing in bilinguals. Motivated by studies reporting mixed findings, in particular for second...

Single words are easier to identify in a briefly presented syntactically correct word sequence compared with a scrambled version of the same set of words: a sentence superiority effect. Interactive-activation models of sentence comprehension can account for this phenomenon by implementing parallel processing of word identities. The cascaded and interactive nature of such processing allows sentence-level structures to influence on-going word processing. Alternatively, prior observations of a sentence superiority effect in post-cued word-in-phrase identification might be due to the sophisticated guessing of word identities on the basis of partial information about the target word and the surrounding context. Here, for the first time, we used electrophysiological recordings to plot the time-course of the sentence superiority effect. According to an interactive-activation account of this phenomenon, the effect should be visible in the N400 component, thought to reflect the mapping of word identities onto higher-level semantic and syntactic representations. Such evidence for changes in highly automatized linguistic processing is not predicted by a sophisticated guessing account. Our results revealed a robust and widespread sentence-superiority effect on the N400 component that onsets around 270 ms post-sentence onset, thus lending support to the interactive-activation account.

Are syntactic representations shared across languages, and how might that inform the nature of syntactic computations? To investigate these issues, we presented French-English bilinguals with mixed-language word sequences for 200 ms and asked them to report the identity of one word at a post-cued location. The words either formed an interpretable grammatical sequence via shared syntax (e.g.,ses feet sont big– where the French wordssesandsonttranslate intohisandare,respectively) or an ungrammatical sequence with the same words (e.g.,sont feet ses big). Word identification was significantly greater in the grammatical sequences – a bilingual sentence superiority effect. These results not only provide support for shared syntax, but also reveal a fascinating ability of bilinguals to simultaneously connect words from their two languages through these shared syntactic representations.

A prominent methodological issue in cognitive research on bilingualism is the lack of consistency in measuring second language (L2) proficiency. To reduce the inconsistency in L2 proficiency measurements, brief and valid vocabulary tests have been developed as an objective measure of proficiency in a variety of languages (e.g., English, French, Spanish). Here, we present LexCHI, a valid lexical test to measure Chinese proficiency. This freely available short test consists of 60 two-character items presented in simplified Chinese. Although it only takes a few minutes to complete LexCHI, the LexCHI scores in two studies correlated significantly with L2 participants' performance in a translation task and a cloze test. We believe that LexCHI is a useful tool for researchers who need to objectively measure Chinese proficiency as part of their investigations.

We present Chinese translation norms for 1,429 English words. Chinese-English bilinguals (N = 28) were asked to provide the first Chinese translation that came to mind for 1,429 English words. The...

In 2 ERP experiments participants read 4-word sequences presented for 200 ms (RPVP paradigm) and were required to decide whether the word sequences were grammatical or not. In Experiment 1, the word sequence consisted of either a grammatically correct sentence (e.g., she can sing now) or an ungrammatical scrambled sequence (e.g., sing can now she). A reduced N400 effect was obtained in the grammatically correct sequences compared to the ungrammatical sequences. In Experiment 2, the critical comparison was between 2 types of ungrammatical sequences: transposed-word sequences (e.g., you that read wrong, transposing 2 adjacent central words can form a grammatical sequence) and control sequences (e.g., you that read worry, transposing any 2 adjacent central words still forms an ungrammatical sequence). An N400 reduction was observed in the transposed-word sequences relative to the control sequences. We interpret these N400 effects as evidence that an elementary syntactic representation can be rapidly constructed on the basis of parallel processing of word identities and their parts-of-speech. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).