Phonological activation among Chinese L1, English L2 bilinguals during silent first and second language reading
Supervisor: Dr. Debra Titone
My name is Lixue Cheng, and this year I did my undergrad honours thesis with Dr. Debra Titone this year. My project looked at phonological activation among Chinese L1, English L2 bilinguals during silent first and second language reading.
In this study, we made use of the error disruption paradigm (Daneman and Reingold 1993) to examine the degree to which bilinguals rely on phonology and other critical information such as orthography during silent reading in Chinese and English. Our results contradict the language typology hypothesis that we initially proposed based on the literature, which predicts stronger activation of phonology during English reading compared to Chinese reading, given that English scripts emphasize phonology to a greater degree than Chinese scripts. We therefore proposed an alternative hypothesis that takes language proficiency into account (termed as language proficiency hypothesis). It is possible that there will be stronger and more automatic activation of phonology during reading in a language that bilinguals have greater proficiency with, irrespective of the links between orthography and phonology in that language.