Electrophysiological correlates of masked orthographic and phonological priming in Chinese–English bilinguals

Extensive behavioral and electrophysiological evidence has demonstrated that native translations are automatically activated when bilinguals read non-native words. The present study investigated the impact of cross-language orthography and phonology on Chinese–English bilingual lexicons with a masked priming paradigm. The masked primes and targets were either translation equivalents (TE), orthographically related through translation (OR), phonologically related through translation (PR), or unrelated control (UC). Participants retained the targets in memory and decided whether the delayed catch words matched the targets. ERP data showed significant masked translation priming effects, as reflected by decreased ERP amplitudes in the TE condition in the 300–600 ms time window from frontal to parietal electrode clusters. Importantly, compared with the UC condition, the PR rather than OR condition elicited less negative ERP waveforms in the 300–500 ms time window with a frontal distribution. Taken together, these temporal and spatial dynamics suggested an automatic cross-language co-activation at the phonological and semantic levels for different-script bilinguals.