The role of cross-language orthography and phonology in translation recognition: an ERP study with Chinese–English bilinguals

Abstract This study investigated the electrophysiological correlates of cross-language orthographic and phonological processing in unbalanced Chinese (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals using a translation recognition task. The critical L1-L2 word pairs were incorrect translation equivalents but orthographically or phonologically related through translation (orthographic or phonological translation neighbor). Compared with the unrelated control, the recognition of L2 words showed comparable reaction time and accuracies when coupled with L1 orthographic or phonological translation neighbors. However, both orthographic and phonological translation neighbors elicited more negative event-related potential (ERP) waveforms in the bulk of the N400 component (300-600 ms) than the unrelated control. These findings were interpreted in the framework of the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus model (BIA+ model), according to which cross-language orthographic and phonological representations were non-selectively accessed during the recognition of the L2 words, and top-down inhibitory control mechanism impacted the cross-language lexical competition and confliction between the two languages.