Cognate Status and Cross-script Priming with Chinese-English Bilinguals and English-Chinese Bilinguals

Abstract

Adopting the masked priming paradigm, the thesis examines the representation and processing of cross-script cognates (i.e. loan words) in Chinese and English. Chinese-English and English-Chinese bilinguals were tested in both lexical decision task and naming task. The relationships of prime (L1) and target (L2) were manipulated so that the prime was either translation equivalent of, phonologically related to, or unrelated to the target. Both cognate and non-cognate produced robust translation priming in Chinese-English LDT (Experiment 1) and naming (Experiment 2), as well as in English-Chinese LDT (Experiment 3). Phonological priming was found in English-Chinese naming task (Experiment 4) for cognates, and in Chinese-English naming task (Experiment 2) for non-cognates. Cognate translation priming was only significantly larger than non-cognate translation priming in tasks where there was phonological priming effect (Experiment 2 and 3). The results are discussed in terms of how cognates and non-cognates are represented and processed in bilingual memory.