Nonselective access of English phonology in bi-scriptal Chinese–Korean visual word recognition

This study investigated the phonological processes with bilingual readers of Korean and Chinese. Three types of same–different matching between the prime and target were compared. The critical point was on whether the phonological information of English was activated automatically in a semantic judgment task involving only Korean and Chinese. The results showed that the latency of the conditions (S+P−, S−P− and S−P+) was significantly different; latencies in the S−P+ condition where there is no semantic but with phonological relations were slower than in the S−P− condition where there are neither semantic nor phonological relations. The implication for phonological recoding was discussed.