We investigated the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying bi-alphabetic reading using event-related potentials (ERPs). Brain activity was recorded using EEG in a group of Russian–English biliterates during a reading-aloud task with familiar and novel words. Capitalizing on a partial overlap between the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, the stimuli were presented in L1 Cyrillic, L2 Roman, or in an ambiguous script, in a counterbalanced fashion. The results revealed functional dissociation between the stimuli in terms of processing their graphemic ambiguity. The interference caused by L1-L2 script inconsistencies in novel wordforms was detected at a late processing stage, reflected in N400 response enhancement for unfamiliar script-ambiguous items. Conversely, familiar ambiguous and L2 words showed no N400 increase but demonstrated an early enhancement of the P200 component in comparison to those presented in L1. These results indicate the use of a whole-word reading strategy for familiar words even in ambiguous script, likely triggered by an automatic activation of well-established lexico-semantic representations. The absence of similar top-down mechanisms for novel ambiguous-script words likely results in increased grapheme-to-phoneme decoding effort, with important implications for L2 reading and vocabulary acquisition.

中文翻译：

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双文大脑中跨字母干扰和整合的神经相关性

我们使用事件相关电位（ERP）研究了双字母阅读背后的神经生理学机制。研究人员使用脑电图记录了一组俄英双文人在朗读熟悉和新单词的任务期间的大脑活动。利用罗马字母和西里尔字母之间的部分重叠，刺激以 L1 西里尔字母、L2 罗马字母或模糊的文字以平衡的方式呈现。结果揭示了刺激之间在处理字形歧义方面的功能分离。新词形中 L1-L2 脚本不一致造成的干扰是在后期处理阶段检测到的，这反映在对不熟悉的脚本模糊项目的 N400 响应增强中。相反，熟悉的歧义词和 L2 词没有表现出 N400 增加，但与 L1 中呈现的相比，显示出 P200 成分的早期增强。这些结果表明，即使在不明确的脚本中，也可以对熟悉的单词使用全词阅读策略，这可能是由成熟的词汇语义表示的自动激活触发的。对于新颖的歧义脚本单词，缺乏类似的自上而下的机制可能会导致字素到音素的解码工作量增加，这对二语阅读和词汇习得具有重要意义。