A prime-masked ERP investigation on phonology in visual word processing among bilingual speakers of alphasyllabic and alphabetic orthographies

In this study, we experimentally manipulated the phonology of the cross-script prime-target dyads in an ERP-coupled masked priming paradigm to explore the role phonology plays in visual word processing. The written characters of certain bilingual dyads seldom show any visual/orthographic similarity, yet have the same phonological representation. While the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model relies on the orthographic similarity between the languages in a bilingual dyad, its revised version (BIA + model) additionally banks on the phonological (and semantic) similarity between the words in such dyads. Thus, there exists the need to investigate the role of phonological (and semantic) similarity between the words of a bilingual dyad, especially in the absence of orthographic similarity. Borrowed words from one language to another provide a suitable avenue to explore this question. Cross-orthographic (or cross-script) bilingual participants of this study performed the semantic judgment of visually presented words in a masked priming paradigm in each of their languages while we simultaneously collected the event-related potentials (ERPs). The primes were either translations (different phonology & orthography: P–O–; phonologically incongruent) or transliterations (same phonology & different orthography: P + O–; phonologically congruent) of the target. Overall, the results showed no difference between the two prime conditions. We discuss our findings in light of the BIA and BIA + models of bilingual visual word processing and discuss the relevance of the former model in orthographically distinct bilingual language dyads.