WORD FREQUENCY EFFECTS IN ENGLISH-MANDARIN AND MANDARIN-ENGLISH BILINGUALS: COMPARING THE COMPETITION, ENTRENCHMENT, AND TRANSFER ACCOUNTS

Abstract

lexical entrenchment hypothesis (language exposure accounts for larger L2 WFE) and the transfer account (transfer of reading strategies from L1 to L2) – have been proposed to explain this finding. However, empirical support for each account is mixed. The present study examined the ability of these accounts in explaining the larger L2 WFE by comparing the performance of English-Mandarin and Mandarin-English bilinguals on an English lexical decision task. While the entrenchment hypothesis partially accounts for the larger L2 WFE, results of this study are most consistent with the transfer account in explaining the larger L2 WFE. Importantly, this study revealed that when a bilingual reader’s L1 and L2 writing systems are highly contrastive (e.g., Mandarin Chinese and English), a transfer of reading strategy from L1 to L2 processing is more easily detected. Specifically, the orthographic depth and the associated reading strategies of a bilingual reader’s L1 will influence L2 processing, such that L2 WFE is larger as compared to L1.