Shared and distinct neural correlates of first and second language morphological processing in bilingual brain

This study explored the neural correlates of morphological processing in adult Chinese-English bilinguals using a morphological priming lexical decision task with concurrent EEG and fNIRS recordings. fNIRS revealed a neural dissociation between morphological and semantic priming effects in the left fronto-temporal network, with L1 Chinese showing enhanced activation in the left prefrontal cortex for morphological parsing compared to L2 English. EEG data showed that early left anterior negativity (ELAN) effects differed in degree but not in kind across languages, indicating shared early structural parsing processes. Both early (P250) and late (300–500 ms negativity) structural parsing processes were shared by L1 and L2. The findings support a unified competition model, suggesting that bilinguals primarily utilize L1 neural resources for L2 morphological processing.

Fei Gao, Lin Hua, Paulo Armada-da-Silva, Juan Zhang, Defeng Li, Zhiyi Chen, Chengwen Wang, Meng Du, Zhen Yuan