The time course of brain activity in reading identical cognates: An ERP study of Chinese - Japanese bilinguals

Neural Evidence of Language Membership Control in Bilingual Word Recognition: An fMRI Study of Cognate Processing in Chinese–Japanese Bilinguals

“…In contrast to previous studies using a single language stimulus list (e.g., Dijkstra et al, 2010 ; Xiong et al, 2020 ), the cognate facilitation effect was absent in this study. Although cognates share both orthographic form and meaning between Chinese and Japanese, the bilinguals took longer time to recognize cognates than Japanese control words, and no significant difference was observed in the RTs for IHs and COs.…”

“…For instance, although both 大學 (Chinese) and 大学(Japanese) are translated as “university” in the respective languages, such words were not selected as stimuli owing to the different orthographic forms (i.e., 学 and 學). Unlike the intrinsic connection between orthography and phonology in the alphabetic writing system, the orthographic overlap does not lead to the phonological overlap between Chinese and Japanese ( Xiong et al, 2020 ). The widely accepted view is that logographic writing systems are recognized predominantly through the mapping between orthographic and lexical-semantic representations rather than phonological information (see Zhou et al, 2009 for a review).…”

“…The dominant proportion of cognates in this study reflected the situation in real life. According to Xiong et al (2020) , approximately 1,163 of 2,058 two-character words are cognates between Chinese and Japanese. The two sets were counterbalanced across participants in the two experiments.…”

“…According to context-sensitive lexical access (see Dijkstra and van Heuven, 2018 for a review), lexicons in two languages are simultaneously accessed, and contextual information allows bilinguals to select an appropriate response to a given context during word recognition (e.g., stimulus list composition). The cognate facilitation effect was mainly observed from single language stimulus list composed of cognates and matched control words from bilinguals’ first (L1) or second language (L2) only (e.g., Peeters et al, 2013 ; Xiong et al, 2020 ). Because no word belongs to any language other than the target language, any lexical activation may be regarded as evidence supporting facilitation in word recognition ( Vanlangendonck et al, 2020 ).…”

“…The phonological overlap is also observed from cognates when the two languages belong to the same language family (e.g., Dijkstra et al, 2010 ; Comesaña et al, 2012 ). Even though the phonological systems are different between Chinese and Japanese, the facilitation effect occurs in recognizing cognates ( Xiong et al, 2020 ). This is because the Japanese language employs Chinese characters to represent semantic meanings.…”