Do Chinese-English Bilinguals Activate Phonology in Early L2 Visual Word-Processing?
Liying Yang, Victoria University of Wellington
Contributing authors: Irina Elgort, Victoria University of Wellington; Sasha Calhoun, Victoria University of Wellington
Sunday, September 20 · 15:00–15:25 JST · Session 6
Abstract
Readers in languages with very different writing systems, such as Chinese and English, may adopt different processing strategies optimized to take advantage of how linguistic information is encoded. For example, in alphabetic languages, like English, phonological activation is typically early and automatic, whereas Chinese readers predominantly rely on orthography-to-semantics mappings with phonological access occurring relatively later. But what happens when reading in a second language (L2)? Are Chinese orthography-to-semantics processing strategies transferred to L2-English word reading, or do L2 readers adopt reading processing strategies characteristic of first language (L1) readers?
The present study investigated whether proficient Chinese-English bilinguals activate phonology during L2 English silent reading. This was tested in an experimental study that employed a boundary and fast-priming paradigm with eye-tracking during natural sentence reading. Target words embedded in sentences were initially masked by scrambled letters; when readers’ eyes crossed an invisible boundary, the mask first changed to a phonologically-related, semantically-related, or unrelated prime, and then to the target.
Sixty high L2-proficiency Chinese-English bilinguals and sixty L1-English readers took part in the experiment. Preliminary results revealed different priming patterns for the two participant groups. In the phonological priming condition, L1 readers showed consistent facilitation across both early (first-fixation duration, gaze duration) and late (go-past time) eye-movement measures, whereas bilinguals showed no comparable facilitation. In the semantic priming condition, bilinguals showed a tendency toward semantic activation, while L1 readers did not.
These findings suggest that, unlike L1 readers, proficient Chinese-English bilinguals do not appear to automatically activate phonological representations at the early stages of visual word processing. Instead, some evidence of preferential reliance on semantic access was observed, indicating a possible influence of L1 orthography-to-semantics processing strategies on L2 reading. These results challenge universal models of reading and highlight the critical role of L1 reading experience in shaping L2 processing.
References
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