Abstract
The present study explored bilingual coactivation during natural monolingual sentence-reading comprehension. Native Chinese readers who had learned Japanese as a second language and those who had not learned it at all were tested. The results showed that unrelated Chinese word pairs that shared a common Japanese translation could parafoveally prime each other. Critically, this translation-related preview effect was modulated by the readers’ language-learning experiences. It was found only among the late Chinese–Japanese bilinguals, but not among the monolingual Chinese readers. By setting a novel step, which was testing bilingual coactivation of semantic knowledge in a natural reading scenario without an explicit presentation of L2 words, our results suggest that bilingual word processing can be automatic, unconscious and nonselective. The study reveals an L2-to-L1 influence on readers’ lexical activation during natural sentence reading in an exclusively native context.
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Data availability and code availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the OSF repository (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/DVM4N).
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This research was supported by a Fundo para o Desenvolvimento das Ciências e da Tecnologia (FDCT) grant from the Macao Science and Technology Development Fund (Project Code: 0015/2021/ITP).
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Hao, Y., Luo, Y., Lin-Hong, K.Hy. et al. Shared translation in second language activates unrelated words in first language. Psychon Bull Rev 31, 1245–1255 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02405-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02405-z