%0 Journal Article
%T Cognate facilitation priming effect is modulated by writing system: Evidence from Chinese
%A Chenggang Wu
%A Juan Zhang
%A Tiemin Zhou
%A Yaxuan Meng
%J International Journal of Bilingualism
%@ 1756-6878
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1367006917749062
%X The present study aims to examine the cross-script cognate facilitation effect that cognates have processing advantages over non-cognates and this effect is strong evidence supporting the non-selective access hypothesis for bilinguals. By adopting a masked translation priming paradigm, Experiment 1 used 48 Chinese每English cognates (Chinese words) and 48 non-cognates (Chinese words) as primes and their English translation equivalences as targets. Chinese每English bilinguals were instructed to judge whether the target stimuli were real words or not. In Experiment 2, another group of participants took the same lexical decision task as in Experiment 1, except that English每Chinese cognates and non-cognates (English words) served as primes and their Chinese translation equivalences were targets. Response latency and accuracy data were submitted to a repeated-measures analysis of variance. Experiment 1 showed that Chinese每English cognates (Chinese words) and non-cognates (Chinese words) produced similar priming effect, while Experiment 2 revealed that English每Chinese cognates (English words) generated a significant priming effect, whereas non-cognates (English words) failed to induce any priming effect. Overall, Chinese words did not show cognate advantage, while English words produced a significant cognate facilitation effect. These results might be attributed to different mappings from orthography to phonology in English and Chinese. Opaque mapping from orthography to phonology in Chinese hindered phonological activation and reduced Chinese每English cognate phonological priming effect. However, English每Chinese cognates benefited from transparent mapping from sound to print and thus generated a significant phonological priming effect. Implications of the current findings for bilingual word recognition models were discussed. The present study is the first to investigate the cross-script cognate facilitation effect by ensuring both the heterogeneity of primes and targets (English and Chinese) and the homogeneity of primes (Chinese or English). The results indicated that the writing systems of the primes constrained the cross-script cognate priming effect
%K Cognate
%K cognate facilitation effect
%K cross-script
%K masked translation priming paradigm
%K writing system
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367006917749062