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Effects of Chinese word structure on object categorization in Chinese–English bilinguals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2020

XUAN PAN  and
DEBRA JARED
XUAN PAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario
DEBRA JARED*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario
*
Address for correspondence: Debra Jared, Department of Psychology, Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 3K7. E-mail: djjared@uwo.ca
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Abstract

We investigated how verbal labels affect object categorization in bilinguals. In English, most nouns do not provide linguistic clues to their categories (an exception is sunflower), whereas in Chinese, some nouns provide category information morphologically (e.g., 鸵鸟- ostrich and 知更鸟- robin have the morpheme鸟- bird in their Chinese names), while some nouns do not (e.g., 企鹅- penguin and 鸽子- pigeon). We examined the effect of Chinese word structure on bilinguals’ categorization processes in two ERP experiments. Chinese–English bilinguals and English monolinguals judged the membership of atypical (e.g., ostrich, penguin) vs. typical (e.g., robin, pigeon) pictorial (Experiment 1) and English word (Experiment 2) exemplars of categories (e.g., bird). English monolinguals showed typicality effects in RT data, and in the N300 and N400 of ERP data, regardless of whether the object name had a category cue in Chinese. In contrast, Chinese–English bilinguals showed a larger typicality effect for objects without category cues in their name than objects with cues, even when they were tested in English. These results demonstrate that linguistic information in bilinguals’ L1 has an effect on their L2 categorization processes. The findings are explained using the label-feedback hypothesis.

Keywords

linguistic relativitybilingualismChinese–English bilingualslinguistic labelword structuremorphological category cueobject categorization
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 468 - 500
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Copyright
© UK Cognitive Linguistics Association, 2020

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Footnotes

Words that do and do not have a category cue occur for words that are learned early (汽车, 巴士), and late (琴酒, 香槟), that are very frequent (苹果, 橙子) and infrequent (蛋白石, 粉晶), that have foreign origins (红酒, 白兰地), and, importantly here, when they are typical members of the category (生菜, 胡萝卜) and atypical members (牛油果, 椰子). English translations are: car, bus, gin, champagne, apple, orange, opal, quartz, wine, brandy, lettuce, carrots, avocado, coconut. Category cues are in bold.

This research was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Debra Jared. We thank Arielle Grinberg for assistance in testing participants, and Steve Lupker and Paul Minda for their feedback on an earlier version of this work. This paper is based on a PhD thesis by Xuan Pan, supervised by Debra Jared.

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