L’effet de la langue seconde sur le traitement des mots composés chinois chez les locuteurs bilingues chinois-français et chinois-anglais
The present study investigated whether the French or English translation equivalents of Chinese compound constituents affect Chinese compound recognition and, if so, whether they affect processing in a comparable manner. We conducted a constituent priming experiment, where targets were bimorphemic Chinese compounds, preceded by one of their constituents or an unrelated item. Chinese-French and Chinese-English bilinguals were assigned to three priming conditions, where primes were translated into their L2 French or L2 English or repeated in their L1 Chinese (transcribed as Pinyin syllables). Results from the L2 priming conditions indicated that participants recognized Chinese compounds as real words significantly faster when they were preceded by one of their constituents, in either French or English, than they were when preceded by an unrelated stimulus. This effect was not restricted to a particular L2, as constituent priming effects produced by French primes patterned with English primes. We failed to find a significant constituent priming effect in the L1 priming condition, possibly due to difficulty in processing Pinyin. We argue that the L2 constituent priming effects on Chinese compound processing provide evidence in favour of an integrated bilingual mental lexicon characterized by lexical as well as sublexical connectivity.
translangagier bilingual mental lexicon compound processing Chinese cross-language Chinese-French bilinguals Chinese-English bilinguals