Cognate translation priming with Chinese-Japanese bilinguals: No effect of interlingual phonological similarity

Previous masked translation priming studies, especially those with different-script bilinguals, have shown that cognates provide more priming than noncognates, a difference attributed to cognates' phonological similarity. In our experiments employing a word naming task, we examined this issue for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals in a slightly different way, using same-script cognates as primes and targets. In Experiment 1, significant cognate priming effects were observed. The sizes of the priming effects were, however, statistically not different for phonologically similar (e.g., /xin4lai4/-/shiNrai/) and dissimilar cognate pairs (e.g., /bao3zheng4/- /hoshoR/), suggesting no impact of phonological similarity. In Experiment 2, using exclusively Chinese stimuli, we demonstrated a significant homophone priming effect using two-character logographic primes and targets, indicating that phonological priming is possible for two-character Chinese targets. However, priming only emerged for pairs that had the same tone pattern (e.g., /shou3wei4/-/shou3wei4/), suggesting that a match in lexical tone is crucial for observing phonologically based priming in that situation. Therefore, Experiment 3 involved phonologically similar Chinese-Japanese cognate pairs in which the similarity of their suprasegmental phonological features (i.e., lexical tone and pitch-accent information) was varied. Priming effects were statistically not different for tone/accent similar pairs (e.g., /guan1xin1/-/kaNsiN/) and dissimilar pairs (e.g., /man3zu2/-/maNzoku/). Our results indicate that phonological facilitation is not involved in producing cognate priming effects for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals. Possible explanations, based on underlying representations of logographic cognates, are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).