Abstract
The present study examines when second language (L2) learners read words in the L2, whether the orthography and/or phonology of the translation words in the first language (L1) is activated and whether the patterns would be modulated by the proficiency in the L2. In two experiments, two groups of Chinese learners of English immersed in the L1 environment, one less proficient and the other more proficient in English, performed a translation recognition task. In this task, participants judged whether pairs of words, with an L2 word preceding an L1 word, were translation words or not. The critical conditions compared the performance of learners to reject distractors that were related to the translation word (e.g.,
, pronounced as /bei 1/) of an L2 word (e.g., cup) in orthography (e.g.,
, bad in Chinese, pronounced as /huai 4/) or phonology (e.g.,
, sad in Chinese, pronounced as /bei 1/). Results of Experiment 1 showed less proficient learners were slower and less accurate to reject translation orthography distractors, as compared to unrelated controls, demonstrating a robust translation orthography interference effect. In contrast, their performance was not significantly different when rejecting translation phonology distractors, relative to unrelated controls, showing no translation phonology interference. The same patterns were observed in more proficient learners in Experiment 2. Together, these results suggest that when Chinese learners of English read English words, the orthographic information, but not the phonological information of the Chinese translation words is activated. In addition, this activation is not modulated by L2 proficiency.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The reason for selecting only eighteen pairs in the present study deserves some clarification. First, as described in Materials, the English items of the translation pairs were selected from the English textbooks used by grade one junior high school students. Because the two textbooks included a small number of English words, the number of available word pairs was limited. Moreover, the Chinese translations of these English stimuli had to have both distracters that were related only in orthography and those related solely in phonology, further limiting the number of critical stimuli. Although the number of translation pairs was relatively small, it has been a practice employed in previous studies (e.g. Bi et al. 2009).
The same stimuli were used in the current experiment as in Experiment 1 to allow direct comparisons. Notably, the higher-proficiency learners had learned these words early on and had been exposed to them frequently in their long and systematic L2 learning. Thus, it would be interesting to examine whether the same patterns would emerge with words with lower frequencies, which higher-proficiency learners acquired later in their L2 learning.
References
Altarriba, J., & Mathis, K. M. (1997). Conceptual and lexical development in second language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 36(4), 550–568. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1997.2493.
Bi, Y., Xu, Y., & Caramazza, A. (2009). Orthographic and phonological effects in the picture word interference paradigm: Evidence from a logographic language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 637–658. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716409990051.
Cai, Q., & Brysbaert, M. (2010). SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese word and character frequencies based on film subtitles. Plos ONE, 5(6), e10729. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010729.
Colomé, A., & Miozzo, M. (2010). Which words are activated during bilingual word production? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 36, 96–109. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017677.
Costa, A., & Caramazza, A. (1999). Is lexical selection in bilingual speech production language-specific? Further evidence from Spanish–English and English–Spanish bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2, 231–244. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728999000334.
de Groot, A. M. (1992). Determinants of word translation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18(5), 1001–1018. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.18.5.1001.
de Groot, A. M. B., Delmaar, P., & Lupker, S. J. (2000). The processing of interlexical homographs in translation recognition and lexical decision: Support for non-selective access to bilingual memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53A, 397–428. https://doi.org/10.1080/713755891.
Dijkstra, T., & van Heuven, W. J. B. (2002). The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5, 175–197. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728902003012.
Dijkstra, A., van Jaarsveld, H., & Ten Brinke, S. (1998). Interlingual homograph recognition: Effects of task demands and language intermixing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 51–66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728998000121.
Ferré, P., Sánchez-Casas, R., & Guasch, M. (2006). Can a horse be a donkey? Semantic and form interference effects in translation recognition in early and late proficient and nonproficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals. Language Learning, 56, 571–608. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2006.00389.x.
Frost, R., Feldman, L. B., & Katz, L. (1990). Phonological ambiguity and lexical ambiguity: effects on visual and auditory word recognition. Haskins Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research, SR-101/102, 85–100. https://doi.org/10.1037//0278-7393.16.4.569
Gollan, T. H., Weissberger, G. H., Runnqvist, E., Montaya, R. I., & Cera, C. M. (2012). Self-ratings of spoken language dominance: A Multilingual Naming Test (MINT) and preliminary norms for young and aging Spanish–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 594–615. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728911000332.
Guasch, M., Sánchez-Casas, R., Ferré, P., & García-Albea, J. E. (2008). Translation performance of beginning, intermediate and proficient Spanish–Catalan bilinguals: Effects of form and semantic relations. The Mental Lexicon, 3(3), 289–308. https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.3.3.03gua.
Guo, T., Misra, M., Tam, J. W., & Kroll, J. F. (2012). On the time course of accessing meaning in a second Language: An electrophysiological and behavioral investigation of translation recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38, 1165–1186. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028076.
Kroll, J. F., & Schweickert, J. M. (1978). Syntactic disambiguation of homographs. In Paper Presented at the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, San Antonio, Texas
Kroll, J. F., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 149–174. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1994.1008.
Kroll, J. F., Bobb, S. C., & Wodniecka, Z. (2006). Language selectivity is the exception, not the rule: Arguments against a fixed locus of language selection in bilingual speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 119–135. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728906002483.
Linck, J. A., Kroll, J. F., & Sunderman, G. (2009). Losing access to the native language while immersed in a second language. Psychological Science, 20, 1507–1515. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02480.x.
Lu, A., Yu, Y., Niu, J., & Zhang, J. X. (2015). The effect of sign language structure on complex word reading in Chinese deaf adolescents. PLoS ONE, 10(3), e0120943. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0120943.
Ma, F., Chen, P., Guo, T., & Kroll, J. F. (2017). When late second language learners access the meaning of L2 words: Using ERPs to investigate the role of the L1 translation equivalent. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 41, 50–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2016.09.006.
Morford, J. P., Kroll, J. F., Piñar, P., & Wilkinson, E. (2014). Bilingual word recognition in deaf and hearing signers: Effects of proficiency and language dominance on cross language activation. Second Language Research, 30(2), 251–271. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658313503467.
Morford, J. P., Wilkinson, E., Villwock, A., Piñar, P., & Kroll, J. F. (2011). When deaf signers read English: Do written words activate their sign translations? Cognition, 118(2), 286–292. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.01.017.
Qasem, M., & Foote, R. (2010). Cross-language lexical activation: A test of the revised hierarchical and morphological decomposition models in Arabic–English bilinguals. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(1), 111–140. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263109990271.
Sunderman, G., & Kroll, J. F. (2006). First language activation during second language lexical processing: An investigation of lexical form, meaning, and grammatical class. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 387–422. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263106060177.
Talamas, A., Kroll, J. F., & Dufour, R. (1999). From form to meaning: Stages in the acquisition of second-language vocabulary. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2, 45–58. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728999000140.
Thierry, G., & Wu, Y. J. (2007). Brain potentials reveal unconscious translation during foreign-language comprehension. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, 104(30), 12530–12535. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0609927104.
Van Hell, J. G., & Kroll, J. F. (2012). Using electrophysiological measures to track the mapping of words to concepts in the bilingual brain: A focus on translation. In J. Altarriba & L. Isurin (Eds.), Memory, Language, and Bilingualism: Theoretical and Applied Approaches (pp. 126–160). New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139035279.006.
Van Hell, J. G., & Tanner, D. (2012). Effects of second language proficiency on cross-language lexical activation. Language Learning, 62, 148–171. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2012.00710.x.
Wu, Y. J., & Thierry, G. (2010). Chinese–English bilinguals reading English hear Chinese. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(22), 7646–7651. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1602-10.2010.
Yip, M. C. W. (2015). Meaning inhibition and sentence processing in Chinese. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44, 611–621. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-014-9308-4.
Zhang, H., Yu, J., Zhan, W., & Yu, Sh. (2001). Disambiguation of Chinese polyphonic characters. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Multimedia Annotation (MMA), Tokyo, Japan.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Zhaohai Song, Junling Yang, and Jiaxin Zhang for their assistance in data collection and Taomei Guo, Gang Cui, and Tianyin Liu for their detailed comments and constructive feedback for this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ma, F., Ai, H. Chinese Learners of English See Chinese Words When Reading English Words. J Psycholinguist Res 47, 505–521 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9533-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9533-8