Visual word recognition of Chinese-Japanese bilinguals: limited role of phonology

The investigation of how orthography and phonology influence lexical semantic access in visual word identification is a crucial area in psycholinguistics. Previous studies, focusing on alphabetic scripts in bilingual lexical recognition, have highlighted the facilitative role of phonological similarity. Yet, the impact of cross-language phonological similarity in bilinguals using non-alphabetic scripts remains unclear. In this study, we employed a lexical decision task to examine Chinese-Japanese bilinguals. Participants were presented with Chinese-Japanese cognate translation pairs, categorized into phonologically similar and dissimilar cognates. Analysis of event-related potentials (ERP) revealed no significant differences between phonologically similar and dissimilar contexts in the early time windows (90-170 ms and 170-270 ms). However, in the later time window (350-500 ms), significant differences were observed, with the phonologically dissimilar condition eliciting a larger negative wave. Contrary to findings in alphabetic script-based studies, our results suggest that in logographic script processing, the activation of phonology and semantics occurs simultaneously, and the influence of phonology is limited. This indicates a distinct cognitive processing mechanism in non-alphabetic language bilinguals, providing new insights into the dynamics of bilingual lexical recognition.