Chinese-English Bilingual Children’s Processing Of Translation Ambiguity

Translation ambiguity, which occurs when a word in one language has multipletranslations into another language, is a common phenomenon cross language. In orderto understand the cognitive processes behind such a phenomenon, researchers haveconducted a number of studies on the issue of translation ambiguity. However,previous studies on the processing of translation ambiguity have mainly focused onadult bilinguals at different proficiency levels and with several language pairs, such asEnglish-Dutch, English-Spanish, English-German and so on. Bilingual children’sprocessing of translation ambiguity, together with the Chinese-English language pair,receives little attention. Moreover, the two types of translation ambiguity—formambiguity and meaning ambiguity, have been tested in different language pairs andshowed different results. The models accounting for translation ambiguity can alsoexplain the phenomenon to different extent. The present study aims to explore howChinese bilingual children learn and process translation ambiguity across Chinese andEnglish. It attempts to investigate whether translation-ambiguous words have alearning and processing disadvantages over translation-unambiguous words andwhich of the two types of translation ambiguity is easier to learn and process, and thenaccounts for the learning and processing difficulties. Two research questions areraised in the present study:1) Are ambiguous words harder for Chinese-Englishbilingual children to learn than unambiguous words? If the answer is yes, why is that?2) Are form-ambiguous words harder to learn than meaning-ambiguous words? If theanswer is yes, why is that?The present study designs an experiment to answer the two research questions.The experiment consists of two sessions. Both sessions start with the English-Chinesetranslation recognition task and participants’ reaction time and accuracy rate arecalculated. The first session begins immediately after training while the secondsession begins approximately two and a half weeks after the first session and no training is provided in this session. Participants complete a language historyquestionnaire at the end of the first session.The experiment reports the following findings:1) During the first session,translation-ambiguous items are recognized more slowly and less accurately thanunambiguous items by participants and by items. The effect of translation ambiguityis significant in the reaction time and accuracy data both by participants and by items.Furthermore, form-ambiguous items are responded to more slowly and less accuratelythan meaning-ambiguous items.2) During the second session, ambiguous items arestill recognized more slowly and less accurately than unambiguous items byparticipants and by items after a two-and-a-half-week delay. The effect of translationambiguity is still significant by participants and by items. The results alsodemonstrate a learning disadvantage for form-ambiguous items overmeaning-ambiguous items, which does not go away after the delay. By and large, bothambiguous items and unambiguous items are recognized more slowly and lessaccurately in the first session than in the second session. To summarize, the results ofthe experiment show that ambiguous words are harder for Chinese-English bilingualchildren to learn than unambiguous words and form-ambiguous words are harder tolearn than meaning-ambiguous words.The present study is believed to be a beneficial complement to the research areaof translation ambiguity and has provided implications for future studies onbilinguals’ processing of translation ambiguity.