Masked Cognate Priming Effects with Chinese–Japanese Bilinguals: Still No Phonological Facilitation for Cognates with Different Scripts

Abstract

A recent masked priming experiment involving Chinese–Japanese logographic cognates (Liu et al., 2019) showed equivalent priming effects for phonologically similar and dissimilar cognate pairs (e.g., 信赖/xin4lai4/-信頼/shiNrai/ and 保证/bao3zheng4/-保証/hoshoR/), suggesting that cognates are not represented in the same way for Chinese–Japanese bilinguals as they are for other types of bilinguals (e.g., Japanese-English). The present study examined whether the same would be true for cross-script Chinese–Japanese cognates, i.e., Chinese hanzi and Japanese katakana cognate pairs (e.g., 巴士/ba1shi4/-バス/basu/ and 瓦斯/wa3si1/-ガス/gasu/). Priming effect sizes were also unaffected by phonological similarity in our experiment. Implications for the underlying connectivity of cognates in the mental lexicon(s) of Chinese–Japanese bilinguals are discussed.