Reading Chinese but with Korean in mind: ERP evidence for nonselective lexical access in sentence reading

Previous studies have investigated whether lexical access in sentence reading is language-selective using interlingual homographs, but have yielded inconsistent results. In this study, event-related potentials were measured when Korean-Chinese bilinguals read the Chinese version of false-cognates (e.g., “放学”, after school) in Chinese sentence contexts that biased the meaning towards the Korean version (e.g., “방학”, school vacation). With the match words as the baseline, Chinese monolinguals elicited similar N400 and P600/LPC effects when reading the false-cognates and mismatch words, whereas Korean-Chinese bilinguals produced a smaller N400 effect for false-cognates than for mismatch words, indicating activation of the Korean version. The P600/LPC effect was observed for false-cognates in bilinguals, reflecting increased integration difficulties or enhanced cognitive control. The study supported the nonselective view and proposed a theoretical extension of the BIA+ model, claiming that bilingual interactive activation might be mediated by shared morphemic representations between languages.