Event-related potential evidence for parallel activation of two languages in bilingual speech production.

The cross-language identity effect refers to the benefit of processing a translation distractor in the cross-language picture-word interference task. The first event-related-potential evidence for this effect was obtained in a picture-naming priming task using Chinese-English bilinguals of languages with distinct scripts. The results indicated that parallel activation of both languages is a universal phenomenon in bilingual speech production. Furthermore, the present study revealed that the temporal course and magnitude of activation of the nontarget language during target language production was modulated by the relative proficiency in the two languages.