Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine whether bilinguals show interference from their relatively less skilled language (L2) during semantic processing in their relatively highly skilled language (L1). In a word-definition judgment task, Chinese-Japanese bilinguals judged if visually presented sets of a word and a definition were target language (Japanese or Chinese). The four types of stimuli pairs appeared in Japanese and/or Chinese dictionaries: both (shared: S), Japanese-specific (J), Chinese-specific (C), and neither (unrelated: U). The false alarm rates for the C pairs in Japanese (L2) condition duplicated the results of bilinguals in Oi et al. (2010) demonstrating higher false alarm rates than Japanese monolinguals. In turn false alarm rates for the J pairs in Chinese (L1) were similar for the C pairs in Japanese (L2) condition. These results suggest that the bilinguals may show interference bidirectionally between L1 and L2 when their scripts resemble each other.
