Compositionality of the Constituent Characters in Chinese Two-Character-Word Recognition by Adult Readers of High and Low Chinese Proficiency.

In Chinese, the graphic units are Chinese characters, most of which are compound characters. Since a compound character can be different from another one in being regarded as composed of components (compositionality), readers might have developed a compositionality awareness of the constituent characters in two-character word (2C-word) recognition. Two experiments were conducted in a lexical decision task on the same set of 2C-words, the first constituent characters of which were manipulated in compositionality. Given that a Chinese character is more difficult to recognize when it is presented upside-down than when it is presented in an upright orientation and that it is inevitable to perceive the constituent characters in 2C-word recognition, we manipulated the first constituent characters' presentation orientation to increase the task difficulty. The two constituent characters of a 2C-word target were displayed simultaneously in a trial in Experiment 1 but were shown sequentially in Experiment 2. Participants were two cohorts of adult Chinese native speakers (CNS1s and CNS2s). CNS1s had a significantly lower level of reading proficiency than CNS2s. The influence of orientation was observed in both CNS1s and CNS2s' performance across the two experiments, but only CNS2s' reaction times seemed to have indicated the effect of compositionality in Experiment 2. Skilled readers are more likely than less skilled readers to be conscious of compositionality of the first constituent characters, which are presented separately from the second ones, in 2C-word recognition.

When interlocutor's face-language matching alters: An ERP study on face contexts and bilingual language control in mixed-language picture naming.

The present study used event-related potentials (ERP) to examine Chinese-English bilinguals' reactive and proactive language control as they performed mixed-language picture naming with face cues. All participants named pictures in Chinese (first language, L1) and English (second language, L2) across three sessions: a 25% face-language matched session, a baseline session without face cues, and a 75% face-language matched session. Behavioral analyses for reactive language control showed that the asymmetrical switch cost was larger for L2 than L1 in the 25% session and for L1 than L2 in the 75% session. ERP results revealed more negative N2 and LPC during L1 switching in 25% session but enhanced N2 during L2 switching in 75% session. Similar N2 and LPC effect was found during L1 and L2 switching in the baseline context. For proactive language control, the reversed language dominance and enhanced LPC amplitudes during L2 naming were consistent across the three sessions. Our findings suggest that reactive but not proactive language control is modulated by the ever-changing face contexts, which highlights the highly flexible bilingual control systems subserving nonlinguistic cues.