Cognate Asymmetric Priming Effect For Less Proficient Chinese And English Bilinguals

Current study aimed to explore masked translation priming effect for Chinese and English cognates and cognate priming facilitation advantageous effect against non-cognates and its modulation of language proficiency. More specifically, English proficiency was accessed with LexTALE(Lemh?fer & Broersma, 2012) grades. 96 cognates and non-cognates were employed as critical stimuli, and priming effect was examined with Chinese cognates and English cognates serving as primes. Cognate priming advantages were ensured by comparing priming effect for counterbalanced non-cognates. Experiments with more details in terms of method and results are as follows:In experiment 1, 37 Chinese and English less proficient bilinguals completed Lexicon Decision Task(LDT). Chinese cognates and non-cognates were used as primes and turned out to significantly facilitate English targets processing. But even if Chinese cognates shared overwhelmingly more phonology as well as semantics than non-cognates with English targets, Chinese cognates still facilitated English targets similarly with non-cognates. Besides, this related priming effect was unrelated with language proficiency.In Experiment 2, 24 Chinese and English less proficient bilinguals completed Lexicon Decision Task(LDT). English cognates and non-cognates was utilized as primes. The overall procedure and stimuli were identical with Experiment1. The results indicated that English cognates primes showed a clear priming advantage over non-cognates because English cognates accelerated processing of Chinese cognate targets while English non-cognates failed to facilitate target identification. And again this effect was irrelevant with language proficiency. Chinese cognate targets produced a delicate inhibition effect, probably due to a competition between semantics and phonology.Combine with two experiments, it is suggested that cognates of two languages produced asymmetric priming effect. In order to understand this asymmetric priming effect for English and Chinese cognates, diverse retrieval pathway of lexico-semantics and mapping from phonology and orthographic needs to be considered. In addition, implications for bilingual cognition models and bilingual word identification were discussed.