Is letter position coding when reading in L2 affected by the nature of position coding used when bilinguals read in...

Using four-character Chinese word targets, Yang, Chen, Spinelli, and Lupker (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(8), 1511-1526, 2019) and Yang, Hino et al. (Journal of Memory and Language, 113, 104017, 2020) demonstrated that backward primes (Roman alphabet example-dcba priming ABCD) produce large masked priming effects. This result suggests that character position information is quite imprecisely coded by Chinese readers when reading in their native language. The present question was, If Chinese readers have evolved a reading system not requiring precise position information, would Chinese-English bilinguals show more extreme transposed letter priming effects when processing English words than both English monolinguals and other types of bilinguals whose L2 is English? In Experiment 1, Chinese-English bilinguals, but not English monolinguals, showed a clear backward priming effect in a lexical decision task. In Experiment 2, the parallel backward priming effect was absent for both Spanish-English and Arabic-English bilinguals. Apparently, the orthographic coding system that Chinese-English bilinguals use when reading in their L2 leans heavily on the flexible/imprecise position coding process that they develop for reading in their L1.