CROSS-LINGUISTIC PHONOLOGICAL INFLUENCE IN ENGLISH-CHINESE BILINGUALS

Abstract

to facilitate the recognition of the targets in the other language. However, though there has been research finding masked phonological priming in Chinese and English, there is also a wealth of research suggesting a limited influence of phonology during Chinese character recognition. Some studies also find that proficiency in the second language influences the presence of priming effects, while others find that priming effects are present regardless of proficiency. The study aims to reconcile these contradictory findings. The study employed the masked priming paradigm to test whether phonologically related primes are able to facilitate recognition times of the targets, specifically, how L2 proficiency and prime-target pair relatedness affect reaction time. No priming effects were found, indicating that phonologically related masked primes did not influence reaction times to the targets. Implications on the reliability of cross-language phonological priming and Chinese models of word recognition are discussed.