Effects of Chinese word structure on object categorization in Chinese–English bilinguals

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe investigated how verbal labels affect object categorization in bilinguals. In English, most nouns do not provide linguistic clues to their categories (an exception issunflower), whereas in Chinese, some nouns provide category information morphologically (e.g., 鸵鸟-ostrichand 知更鸟-robinhave the morpheme鸟-birdin their Chinese names), while some nouns do not (e.g., 企鹅-penguinand 鸽子-pigeon). We examined the effect of Chinese word structure on bilinguals’ categorization processes in two ERP experiments. Chinese–English bilinguals and English monolinguals judged the membership of atypical (e.g.,ostrich,penguin) vs. typical (e.g.,robin,pigeon) pictorial (Experiment 1) and English word (Experiment 2) exemplars of categories (e.g.,bird). English monolinguals showed typicality effects in RT data, and in the N300 and N400 of ERP data, regardless of whether the object name had a category cue in Chinese. In contrast, Chinese–English bilinguals showed a larger typicality effect for objects without category cues in their name than objects with cues, even when they were tested in English. These results demonstrate that linguistic information in bilinguals’ L1 has an effect on their L2 categorization processes. The findings are explained using the label-feedback hypothesis.