Dynamic effect of tonal similarity in bilingual auditory lexical processing

TY - JOUR

T1 - Dynamic effect of tonal similarity in bilingual auditory lexical processing

AU - Wu, Junru

AU - Chen, Yiya

AU - van Heuven, Vincent J.

AU - Schiller, Niels O.

N1 - Funding Information: This work was supported by Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and China Scholarship Council under “Talent and Training China-Netherlands Programme 2011”, by the Shanghai Education Development Foundation and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission under “Chenguang Programme 2015”, by China Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (12901-120215-10222), by Shanghai Planning Office of philosophy and social sciences (2017BYY001), and by the European Research Council (ERC-Starting Grant 206198). Publisher Copyright: © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

PY - 2019/5/28

Y1 - 2019/5/28

N2 - Phonological similarity affects bilingual lexical access of etymologically-related translation equivalents (ETEs). Jinan Mandarin (JM) and Standard Chinese (SC) are closely related and share many ETEs, which are usually orthographically and segmentally identical but vary in tonal similarity. Using an auditory lexical decision experiment and Generalised Additive Modelling, the present study investigates how cross-linguistic tonal similarity interacts with language of operation and how the switching of language across blocks influences SC-JM bilinguals’ auditory lexical processing of ETEs. Bilinguals showed a language dominance effect, indicating that ETEs are specified with separated word-form representations. Compared with SC tonal monolinguals, bilinguals showed a discontinuous bilingual auditory lexical advantage, instead of a classical bilingual lexical disadvantage. The dynamic role of cross-linguistic tonal similarity in auditory word processing is discussed in light of the bilinguals’ attentional shift with the change of language mode at the pre-lexical and lexical stages.

AB - Phonological similarity affects bilingual lexical access of etymologically-related translation equivalents (ETEs). Jinan Mandarin (JM) and Standard Chinese (SC) are closely related and share many ETEs, which are usually orthographically and segmentally identical but vary in tonal similarity. Using an auditory lexical decision experiment and Generalised Additive Modelling, the present study investigates how cross-linguistic tonal similarity interacts with language of operation and how the switching of language across blocks influences SC-JM bilinguals’ auditory lexical processing of ETEs. Bilinguals showed a language dominance effect, indicating that ETEs are specified with separated word-form representations. Compared with SC tonal monolinguals, bilinguals showed a discontinuous bilingual auditory lexical advantage, instead of a classical bilingual lexical disadvantage. The dynamic role of cross-linguistic tonal similarity in auditory word processing is discussed in light of the bilinguals’ attentional shift with the change of language mode at the pre-lexical and lexical stages.

KW - Bilingualism

KW - cognate

KW - cross-linguistic similarity

KW - lexical access

KW - tone

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85057616286&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/23273798.2018.1550206

DO - 10.1080/23273798.2018.1550206

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85057616286

SN - 2327-3798

VL - 34

SP - 580

EP - 598

JO - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

JF - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

IS - 5

ER -