Abstract
An essential step to create phonology according to the language production model by Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer is to assemble phonemes into a metrical frame. However, recently, it has been proposed that different languages may rely on different grain sizes of phonological units to construct phonology. For instance, it has been proposed that, instead of phonemes, Mandarin Chinese uses syllables and Japanese uses moras to fill the metrical frame. In this study, we used a masked priming-naming task to investigate how bilinguals assemble their phonology for each language when the two languages differ in grain size. Highly proficient Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals showed a significant masked onset priming effect in English (L2), and a significant masked syllabic priming effect in Mandarin Chinese (L1). These results suggest that their proximate unit is phonemic in L2 (English), and that bilinguals may use different phonological units depending on the language that is being processed. Additionally, under some conditions, a significant sub-syllabic priming effect was observed even in Mandarin Chinese, which indicates that L2 phonology exerts influences on L1 target processing as a consequence of having a good command of English.
Highlights
Speaking involves the retrieval of phonological representations and their conversion into articulatory commands
According to the language production model by Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer [1], an essential step in this process is the insertion of phonemes into syllabic metrical frames
It has been shown that when the onset overlaps significant facilitation effects occur but not when only the ending overlaps
Summary
Speaking involves the retrieval of phonological representations and their conversion into articulatory commands. One of the motivations for the construction of syllables in this way comes from frequent re-syllabification found in Dutch and English [1], which necessitates an on-the-fly construction rather than the storage of syllables The motivation that this process takes places in units of phonemes comes from results of implicit priming experiments [2,3] as well as priming experiments [4±8]. It has been shown that significant facilitation effects occur for homogeneous groups but not for heterogeneous groups. These results were taken to indicate the incremental nature and unit size of the association-to-frame process in the Levelt et al
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