Incidental Reading of Familiar and Unfamiliar Words: An Event-Related Potential Study of English Monolingual and Chinese-English Bilingual Readers

摘要

Reading occurs automatically when words are presented to an adult skilled reader. During a nonreading task, can we find effects of orthography, lexical status, and frequency as evidence of incidental reading occurring automatically? This study used event-related brain potential (ERP) methodology to investigate lexical processing in 12 English monolinguals and 12 Chinese-English bilinguals as they searched for a triangle shape embedded in English and Chinese words and nonwords. We found some effects of orthography, lexicality, and pronounceability, but no effects of frequency. Results suggest that orthographic and some phonological information is processed automatically during passive viewing. Variations on this task can be utilized to minimize decision-related noise in the ERP signal.