Masked Translation Priming Effects for Chinese-English-Japanese Triple Cognates in Lexical Decision Tasks

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Linguistics

Background:

• Cognate translation priming effects are observed in bilinguals even with different scripts.
• Phonological similarity of primes contributes to these effects.
• Previous research primarily focused on bilinguals, not trilinguals with triple different-script cognates.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate masked cognate priming effects in Chinese-English-Japanese trilinguals.
• To examine priming effects across six different priming directions (L1↔L2, L1↔L3, L2↔L3).
• To determine the role of prime language strength in cross-script cognate priming.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a masked priming lexical decision task (LDT).
• Employed Chinese-English-Japanese trilingual participants.
• Tested priming effects with triple different-script cognates (e.g., /ka1 feɪ1/-coffee-コーヒー).

Main Results:

• Significant masked cognate priming effects were observed.
• Priming effects were only significant when primes originated from the participant's stronger language.
• An asymmetric priming pattern was noted across language pairs.

Conclusions:

• The phonological similarity of cognate primes facilitates processing of different-script triple cognates.
• This facilitation is dependent on the robustness of prime processing.
• Prime language strength plays a critical role in cross-script cognate priming effects for trilinguals.