Word recognition in a language with multiple orthographies: A semantic masked-priming study of L1 Mandarin learners of L3 Japanese

Abstract

Abstract This study explored the organization of the multilingual lexicon in L3 learners of Japanese from an L1 Mandarin Chinese background. Using a masked-priming paradigm, it examined whether native-language translations of Japanese words facilitated the recognition of native-morpheme hiragana words and katakana-script loanwords to a similar degree. Participants performed a lexical decision task on a series of hiragana and katakana words, which were preceded by three prime types: noncognate translations, same-script duplicates, and unrelated words. Results showed an equal magnitude of priming from L1 translations for L3 Japanese targets in both scripts, suggesting that conceptual information is made rapidly available for word recognition via an L1 prime. However, priming in the same-script duplicate condition differed numerically between hiragana and katakana, indicating that lower-familiarity katakana loanwords are not activated as rapidly as words in the more-familiar hiragana script. Findings are discussed in relation to models of the multilingual lexicon.