The locus of Katakana–English masked phonological priming effects

Abstract

Japanese-English bilinguals completed a masked phonological priming study with Japanese Katakana primes and English targets. Event related potential (ERP) data were collected in addition to lexical decision responses. A cross-script phonological priming effect was observed in both measures, and the effect did not interact with frequency. In the ERP data, the phonological priming effect was evident before the frequency effect. These data, along with analyses of response latency distributions, provide evidence that the cross-script phonological priming effects were the consequence of the activation of sublexical phonological representations in a store shared by both Japanese and English. This activation fed back to sublexical and lexical orthographic representations, influencing lexical decision latencies. The implications for the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) model of word recognition are discussed.

Cross-script phonological priming with Japanese Kanji primes and English targets

“…The ERP data reported in Ando et al (2014) are consistent with the idea that phonological priming involves both feedforward and feedback mechanisms. They observed an effect of primetarget phonological similarity in the 200-250 ms time window, prior to the emergence of an effect of target frequency (250-300 ms time window).…”

“…However, one aspect of Zhou et al's (2010) data was not consistent with the conclusion that their priming effect was lexical in nature. Zhou et al found that the size of the phonological priming effect did not depend on the English proficiency of bilinguals, a finding that is consistent with other previous cross-script priming experiments involving non-logographic primes (Ando et al, 2014;Dimitropoulou et al, 2011;Nakayama et al, 2012). If the locus of their phonological priming effect was lexical, one might expect that the effect would be modulated by L2 proficiency or target frequency.…”

“…The magnitude of the effect was similar in the two experiments (20 ms in the naming study, 18 ms in the lexical decision study), however the statistical outcome differed because response times were more variable (standard errors were higher) in the lexical decision study than in the naming study. Both Nakayama, Sears, Hino, and Lupker (2012) and Ando, Matsuki, Sheridan, and Jared (2014) found that Japanese-English bilinguals made faster lexical decisions to English targets (e.g., GUIDE) when they were preceded by phonologically similar words written in the Katakana script (e.g., サイド, /sa-ee-do/, meaning "side" in English), than when they were preceded by phonologically dissimilar words (e.g., コール, /ko-o-ru/, meaning "call" in English). Furthermore, Ando et al found a phonological priming effect in event-related potential (ERP) data.…”

“…The divergence point for the phonological priming effect was 552 ms, which suggested that the feedback mechanism was the most likely cause of phonological priming observed in their behavioural data. Further evidence that the cross-script phonological priming effect involves sublexical and not lexical phonology is that the effect does not appear to depend on the proficiency of the participants (Ando et al, 2014;Dimitropoulou et al, 2011;Nakayama et al 2012; but see Gollan et al, 1997), nor does it interact with word frequency (Ando et al, 2014;Nakayama et al 2012). …”

“…Although cross-script phonological priming effects have been observed in Japanese-English bilinguals with Katakana primes and English targets (Ando et al, 2014;Nakayama et al, 2012), the Katakana script is primarily used to represent loan words in Japanese. Therefore, it is possible that phonological representations associated with these words might be more integrated with phonological representations of English words compared to words that are specific to Japanese.…”