Lin, C. & Tzeng, A. K.
the Department of Psychology in Chung Yuan Christian University
Two ERPs experiments were conducted to investigate code switching effect in Mandarin-English bilinguals. Stimuli were sentences presented in Mandarin (Experiment 1) or English (experiment 2). The last words in the sentences were the target. There were three types of targets: the expected words, synonyms (Lexical Switching, LS) and translations (Code Switching, CS). Participants were right-handed Mandarin-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, N400 (400 - 500 ms) were significantly larger in CS condition than in Control and LS conditions. Experiment 2 showed the same effect in English. The comparison of CS between two experiments suggested that switching from L1 to L2 (experiment 1) elicited a larger N400 than from L2 to L1 (experiment 2). The comparison among three conditions showed only CS condition elicited a positivity before N400 (between 300 and 400 ms). We hypothesized this was a P300 due to the change of languages.