Processing costs in Cantonese-Latin script-mixing

Abstract An emerging trend among young Cantonese speakers is to script-mix morphographic Chinese characters with Latin graphemes in social media exchanges, uncommon in traditional Chinese contexts. Results of a self-paced reading experiment with Cantonese speakers are reported to determine whether script-mixing incurs processing costs, and if so, whether these can be attributed to Inhibitory Control of one of the two scripts or to Dual Activation of both scripts but with slower lexical access within the non-dominant script. Sentences were presented either entirely in Chinese characters or had one region presented in Latin graphemes. Processing costs arose only at the switch from Latin graphemes back to Chinese characters, pointing to the involvement of Inhibitory Control. Further, these costs only appeared in a subset of grammatical categories, potentially coinciding with parsing uncertainties. As such, a combination of script-mixing and parsing complexities could be seen to result in processing costs in certain sentential positions.