Abstract
Previous experimental studies suggest that bilinguals’lexical access is language non
selective, and that L1 word frequency plays a role in L2 word recognition. The current
eye-tracking study investigated L1 frequency effects of lexical syntactic information
during reading. Chinese-Japanese bilinguals read L2-Japanese sentences containing
two types of cognate verbal nouns. Though these words were cognates, they differed
in the frequency with which they appeared as passives between Japanese and Chinese.
Stimuli items were all displayed in Japanese in either their active or passive voice form
for both the experimental (low frequency of L1-Chinese passive usage, e.g., 指示‘in-
struct’) and control (high frequency of L1-Chinese passive usage, e.g., 逮捕‘arrest’)
conditions. The frequencies in L2-Japanese were controlled to be equal for all items.
The results demonstrated that cognates with low frequency of L1-Chinese passive usage
induced longer L2-Japanese reading times during early and late stages of processing in
comparison to all other conditions. These cognates also displayed lower accuracy than
their active voice counterparts. In conclusion, this study revealed that besides the over-
all word frequency, the L1 frequency of syntactic information has substantial influence
on the processing of the target L2 language.
