Nonselective access of English phonology in bi-scriptal Chinese-Korean visual word recognition.

This study investigated the phonological processes with bilingual readers of Korean and Chinese. Three types of same-different matching between the prime and target were compared. The critical point was on whether the phonological information of English was activated automatically in a semantic judgment task involving only Korean and Chinese. The results showed that the latency of the conditions (S+P-, S-P- and S-P+) was significantly different; latencies in the S-P+ condition where there is no semantic but with phonological relations were slower than in the S-P- condition where there are neither semantic nor phonological relations. The implication for phonological recoding was discussed.