Fast automatic translation and morphological decomposition in Chinese- English bilinguals

Zhang, Taoli; van Heuven, Walter J.B.; Conklin, Kathy

Abstract

In this study, we investigated automatic translation from English to Chinese and subsequent morphological decomposition of translated Chinese compounds. In two lexical decision tasks, Chinese-English bilinguals responded to English target words that were preceded by masked unrelated primes presented for 59 ms. Unbeknownst to participants, the Chinese translations of the words in each critical pair consisted of a fully opaque compound word (i.e., a compound with two constituent morphemes that were semantically unrelated to the compound) and a monomorphemic word that was either the first or the second morpheme of the compound. The data revealed that bilinguals responded faster to English word pairs whose Chinese translations repeated the first morpheme than to English word pairs whose Chinese translations did not repeat the first morpheme, but no effect of hidden second-morpheme repetition was found. This effect of hidden first-morpheme repetition suggests that participants translated English words to Chinese and decomposed the translated compounds into their constituent morphemes. Because the primes were presented for only 59 ms, translation and morphological decomposition must be fast and automatic.

Citation

Zhang, T., van Heuven, W. J., & Conklin, K. (2011). Fast automatic translation and morphological decomposition in Chinese- English bilinguals. Psychological Science, 22(10), doi:10.1177/0956797611421492

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2011
• Deposit Date: May 28, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: May 28, 2015
• Journal: Psychological Science
• Print ISSN: 0956-7976
• Electronic ISSN: 0956-7976
• Publisher: Association for Psychological Science
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 10
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611421492
• Keywords: bilingualism, word recognition, priming
• Public URL: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/28910
• Copyright Statement: Copyright information regarding this work can be found at the following address: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/end_user_agreement.pdf