Bilingual Access to Loanwords among Different-script Bilinguals: Effects of Sentence Context, Word Frequency and Proficiency

Whether bilingual lexicon is language-specific or language-nonspecific is one of the fundamental questions in bilingualism. With regard to bilingual word recognition, there are two aspects interpreting bilingual mental lexicon, namely, language selective access in separate lexicons versus language nonselective access in an integrated lexicon. The investigation into bilingual selective versus nonselective access has been conducted in
various studies that used strategy of manipulating the orthographic, phonological and semantic similarity of words from two languages, particularly words sharing both orthography and semantics in two languages (i.e. cognates), words sharing orthography but not meaning in two languages (i.e. interlingual homographs), and cross-language orthographic and phonological word neighbors. Many studies favoring bilingual co-activation have provided evidence for a facilitation effect of cognates and an interference effect of interlingual homographs, compared to control words. The facilitation effect during cognate recognition is commonly due to the activation of L1 lexical representation of the cognate which, to a certain extent, is mapped onto the same semantic representation and speeds up the processing of cognates compared to non-cognate control words.
Among previous studies, the facilitation effect of cognates/loanwords has been widely discussed among same-script bilinguals who process cognates in isolation and in sentence contexts, as well as among different-script bilinguals who process cognates out of sentence context only. Though there have been studies on cross-linguistic lexical facilitation among different-script bilinguals, the language pairs involved were all alphabetic languages such as Japanese-English and Korean-English.
The present project aims to investigate the facilitation effect of loanwords among different-script bilinguals (i.e. Chinese-English bilinguals). More specifically, three experiments, with capitalizing on bilingual visual word recognition paradigms and joint behavioral methods and eye-tracking measurement, will be included to monitor Chinese-English bilinguals' performance during loanwords processing in an isolated condition without context (Experiment 1) versus in a sentence context (Experiment 2). Moreover, word frequency (Experiment 3) and L2 proficiency (Experiment 3) will also be included to investigate whether and how these factors interact and modulate bilingual lexical access.
The proposed project falls into a study area in the discipline of psycholinguistics that interprets bilingual lexical access, i.e., how bilinguals access and process the lexicon of a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) during language comprehension. With respect to the research significance, firstly, the project is an initial and exploratory attempt to involve different-script bilinguals whose native language is logographic (e.g. Chinese) and second language is alphabetic (e.g. English) in studies on bilingual lexical access. Secondly, this project might make theoretical and original contribution to the generalization of findings concerning the facilitation effect of loanwords and the modulation effect of sentence context, word frequency, and L2 proficiency. Thirdly, the results of the project might be helpful to discuss the implications for bilingual cognition models such as BIA+ model.
It is hypothesized that a) loanwords facilitation effect would be significant in the visual word recognition paradigm regardless of task conditions (in isolation vs. in sentence context); b) facilitation effect would be greater in low-constraint sentences; c) higher loanword frequency, especially in L1, would generally elicit faster response latency compared to loanwords with lower frequency, and there would be more significant facilitation effect for Chinese dominant Chinese-English bilinguals.