Native-Language Phonological Interference in Early Hakka–Mandarin Bilinguals’ Visual Recognition of Chinese Two-Character Compounds: Evidence from the Semantic-Relatedness Decision Task

Previous research has indicated that, in viewing a visual word, the activated phonological representation in turn activates its homophone, causing semantic interference. Using this mechanism of phonological mediation, this study investigated native-language phonological interference in visual recognition of Chinese two-character compounds by early Hakka–Mandarin bilinguals. A visual semantic-relatedness decision task in Chinese was given to native Mandarin speakers and early Hakka–Mandarin bilinguals. Both participant groups made more false positive errors and responded more slowly to the pair of two-character compounds containing a homophone; but only Hakka–Mandarin bilinguals made more false positive errors and responded more slowly to the pair containing a near-homophone. We concluded that phonology is needed in both native and nonnative speakers’ meaning access of Chinese two-character compounds and that native-language phonological interference is universal in L2 visual word recognition, not language type dependent; phonological and orthographic information are “interactive-compensatory” in helping Hakka readers’ resolve the interference.