Orthographic Awareness and Phonological Awareness of Late Chinese-English Bilinguals: Evidence from Word-Picture Interference Tasks

Orthographic Awareness and Phonological Awareness of Late Chinese- English Bilinguals: Evidence from Word-Picture Interference Tasks Yang Yumeng Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong molly.yang@polyu.edu.hk Abstract The distractor stimuli are highly effective in modulating speech production latencies in word-picture interference task. It is one of the main experimental methods to explore the relationship between speech production net- work and perception network (Levelt et al., 1999). The distractors can be presented in both visual and auditory modalities (Lupker, 1979; Meyer and Shriefers, 1990). The interference effect (either facilitatory or inhibitory) can vary from interfering stimuli types (Lupker, 1979; Lupker, 1982; Glaser and Dungelhoff, 1984; Meyer and Shriefers, 1990). This study has adopted a visual and an auditory interference experiment on two groups of Chinese-English bilinguals with different L2 proficiency level to figure out if there is the effect of L2 proficiency and the effect of interference modality on response latency or accuracy on two proficiency groups of late Chinese-English bilinguals. From the accuracy result, all the late bilinguals in this study may have limited orthographic awareness and weak phonologi- cal encoding ability. 1 Introduction Speech production is fast and accurate processing in our daily life. However, it can be exceedingly com- plex which entails the activation of many processes that unfold over time (Levelt et al., 1999; Cara- mazza, 1997; Dell, 1986). It’s involved mainly three levels of processing: conceptualization, formation, and articulation (Jescheniak and Levelt, 1994; Lev- elt, 1999). For the level of conceptualization, speak- ers need to prepare the speech concept in mind and link it to a particular spoken word. For the level of formation, it includes stages of grammatical encod- ing, morpho-phonological encoding, and phonetic encoding (Levelt, 1999). On the stage of grammati- cal encoding, the syntactic or lexica lemma of the concept is selected. Morpho-phonological encoding is the process of breaking the lemma down into syl- lables to be produced in overt speech. Phonetic en- coding is the process to piece together utterance of the syllables and complete vocal apparatus. It is wildly accepted that there are relationships between perception and production network. How- ever, the discussion about whether the word percep- tion network and word production network are achieved by the same mechanism (Liberman, 1996; Roelofs et al., 1996; Dell et al., 1997) is controver- sial. Word-picture interference paradigm, which distractor stimuli are highly effective in modulating the speech production process has been one of the main experimental methods to study this issue since Schriefers (1990). From a review of the theory of lexical access in speech production (Levelt at al., 1999), they made an assumption that the distractor words, whether written or spoken, affects corresponding morpheme node in the production network. This assumption finds supports in word production literature; spoken word recognition involves phonological activation (McQueen et al., 1995); visual word processing occurs along both visual and phonological pathways (Cotheart et al., 1993; Seidenberg and McClelland 1989) . In other words, the phonological activation occurred in both …

Content truncated to 500 words