An ERP Study of L2 English Bilinguals in Hong Kong

Purpose. While bilinguals are found to have their lexical and conceptual processes intertwined during the comprehension, how this intertwining affects text processing and individual differences in L2 proficiency interacts with it remains to be addressed. Here, we address how L2 proficiency constitutes critical sources of comprehension problem at different levels of L2 text processing/representation (i.e., lexical/conceptual /situational, Kintsch (1998)). Methods. Event-related potentials (EPRs) were recorded while native Chinese speakers (adult L2/ESL, English as the second language, low and high L2/ESL proficiency 25 each), read two-sentences passages in English that varied in the referent availability for a target word (e.g. “explosion”) that appeared across a sentence boundary at the beginning of a second sentence. The relation of the target word to the text (“referential matching”) represents three levels of text representation (Kintsch, 1998): A surface level match as in “…exploded.. The explosion…”; a textbase match as in “…blew up.. The explosion…”; and a situation model level as in “…bomb…dropped. The explosion…”. The N400, an ERP index of semantic processing difficulty, on the target word was measured and analyzed to examine the temporal dynamics of levels of text process/representation that vary in L2/ESL proficiency. Results. L2/ESL proficiency difference is observed mainly on the inference-making. The N400 for situational-level match was reduced for high L2/ESL but elevated for low L2/ESL; while the N400 for the surface-level and textbase match remained the same for both low and high L2/ESLs. Thus, bilinguals’ levels of semantic stratification (e.g., lexical/semantic/conceptual) are not as well-refined as monolinguals, reflecting the intertwining effect regardless bilingual proficiencyConclusions. The results suggest that a major source of comprehension problem at the text level for L2/ESLs lies in their less refined lexical-knowledge structure, compared with monolinguals (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). This leads L2 readers to draw on additional inferences to compensate processing efficiency. Bilingual experience in proficiency facilitates processes of text comprehension more by recourse to inference-making than by lexical-semantic processing, which may continue to be non-native like (Clahsen & Felser, 2006). ReferencesClahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2006). How native-like is non-native language processing? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(12), 564-570.Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.Perfetti, C. A., & Hart, L. (2002). The lexical quality hypothesis. In L. Vehoeven. C. Elbro & P. Reitsma (Eds.), Precursors of functional literacy (pp. 189–213). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Yang, C. L., Perfetti, C. A., & Schmalhofer, F. (2007). ERP indicators of text integration across sentence boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 33, 55-89.Yang, C. L., Perfetti, C. A., & Schmalhofer, F. (2005). Less skilled comprehenders’ ERPs show sluggish word-to-text integration processes. The special issue of Literacy Processes and Literacy Development in Written Language & Literacy, 8(2), 157-181.