中  華  心  理  學  刊
民93，46卷，2期，91-111

Rong-Bao Li（Foreign Language Institute, Fujian Teachers University, PROC ）；Dan-Ling Peng（Department of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, PROC）；Tao-Mei Guo（Department of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, PROC）；Jing-Han Wei（Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PROC）；Chun-Mao Wang（Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PROC）

Abstract

An event-related brain potential experiment was conducted to probe into the issue of bilingual representation. 224 sentences with the last word lexically consistent or inconsistent and semantically congruous or incongruous to the main part were presented to 21 coordinate bilinguals of Chinese and English to attain the N400 elicited by withinand between-language semantic integration. The subjects read the sentences word by word on a computer monitor without knowing the last word to appear being Chinese or English and being semantically congruous or incongruous. The ERPs elicited by the last word of each sentence was recorded and analyzed. The result suggested that Chinese and English ending words elicited highly similar N400 in both conditions of integration, indicating that the two languages shared a common semantic representation.

Keywords: ERP, bilingual semantic representation, semantic integration.