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Automatic phonetic transfer in bidialectal reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Agnes S. L. Lam ,
Charles A. Perfetti  and
Laura Bell
Agnes S. L. Lam*
Affiliation:
National University of Singapore
Charles A. Perfetti
Affiliation:
National University of Singapore
Laura Bell
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
*
Dr. Agnes Lam, c/o Mr. Philip Lam, Blk. 1, Flat B18, 23, Sha Wan Drive, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
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Abstract

This study investigated phonetic activation in reading a nonalphabetic script – Chinese. Since the Chinese ideographic script can be read with more than one dialectal pronunciation, a reader who has learned to read in two dialects will have two pronunciations for the same word stored in his memory. Thus, interference effects will occur. Sixteen subjects who read in Cantonese and Mandarin and 16 subjects who read in Mandarin but not in Cantonese were tested in a similarity judgment task based on pairs of Chinese words that were pronounced the same or differently in one or both of the dialects. That automatic phonetic activation would occur even for an ideographic script such as Chinese was supported by the results.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 299 - 311
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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