suggesting that more positive mean amplitudes were associated with shorter translation latencies. Although speakers present a weak but reliable neural activation, we suggest that phonological overlap between context pictures and target words had no impact on the translation processing in behavioral. That is, the non-target lemma did not activate their phonological node, and multiple phonological activation was absent in Chinese spoken production. Meanwhile, the semantic information of context pictures was indeed activated, and according to the temporal course of word translation, the time window of 400~600 ms was estimated for conceptual preparation when Chinese-English bilinguals completed a word translation task, although this activation was not transmitted from semantic level to phonological level. Overall, the present findings support a serial discrete model rather than an interactive model in Chinese spoken word production.

No abstract