Whether the phonology in the first language (L1) interferes with the word recognition in the second language (L2) in the bilingual minds is a subject of lively debate. We will examine this issue in sound similarity judgment tasks, specifically, by assessing effects of phonological interface on the recognition of Chinese disyllabic word pairs by English (L1) – Chinese (L2) bilingual speakers. The spoken forms of the Chinese disyllabic word pairs (e.g., 时间-老虎) are similar in L1 (e.g., time-tiger), but their corresponding L2 spoken forms are very different (shijian-laohu). Our hypothesis is that if the bilingual speakers indeed translate the L2 automatically and unconsciously to their L1, there would be a phonological interference effect during L2 word recognition. We expect that the English (L1) — Chinese (L2) bilinguals would find it difficult to judge these Chinese word pairs. In other words, there is some Stroop-like effect in bilingual brains when the bilinguals process L2 sound perceptive tasks.
@InProceedings{GENG18.4, author = {Libo Geng and Lillian Zhao}, title = {The Stroop-like Effect During Sound Perception Task in Bilingual Minds}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {may}, date = {7-12}, location = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Barry Devereux and Ekaterina Shutova and Chu-Ren Huang}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {979-10-95546-08-5}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper