Citation

Wang X, Wang J, Malins JG. Cognition 2017; 169: 15-24.

Affiliation

Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.cognition.2017.07.013

PMID

28803218

Abstract

Although lexical tone is a highly prevalent phonetic cue in human languages, its role in bilingual spoken word recognition is not well understood. The present study investigates whether and how adult bilinguals, who use pitch contours to disambiguate lexical items in one language but not the other, access a tonal L1 when exclusively processing a non-tonal L2. Using the visual world paradigm, we show that Mandarin-English listeners automatically activated Mandarin translation equivalents of English target words such as 'rain' (Mandarin 'yu3'), and consequently were distracted by competitors whose segments and tones overlapped with the translations of English target words ('feather', also 'yu3' in Mandarin). Importantly, listeners were not distracted by competitors that overlapped with the translations of target words in all segments but not tone ('fish'; Mandarin 'yu2'), nor were they distracted by competitors that overlapped with the translations of target words in rime and tone ('wheat', Mandarin 'gu3'). These novel results demonstrate implicit access to L1 lexical representations through automatic/unconscious translation, as a result of cross-language top-down and/or lateral influence, and highlight the critical role of lexical tone activation in bilingual lexical access.

Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Bilingual lexical access; Bilingualism; Lexical tone; Spoken word recognition; Unconscious translation; Visual world paradigm