Phonological and orthographic processing during second language typing production of Chinese-English bilinguals

Two basic issues in written production concern whether phonology influences the output of orthography and how language processes affect the motor execution. Previous studies conducted in the native language (L1) have provided evidence for handwriting production, but less is known about how phonology and orthography work in second language (L2) typing production, and whether their work would be modulated by L2 proficiency. In the current study, the picture-word interference paradigm was adopted, in which 45 proficient (Experiment 1) and 44 non-proficient (Experiment 2) Chinese-English bilinguals were required to typewrite the English name of the picture while attempting to ignore written distractor word. The distractor word was either orthographically highly related (near-bear), phonologically highly related (chair-bear), or unrelated (cloud-bear) to the picture name (e.g., bear). The response times for the cognitive coding phase, as well as the whole response duration and the mean length of inter-keystroke intervals for the motor execution phase, were recorded. The overall results suggested that phonological and orthographic processing in the two phases might be modulated by L2 proficiency, which may be due to the differences in the quality and accessibility of phonological and orthographic representations for bilinguals with different L2 proficiency. Finally, we conducted Experiment 3 to test our interpretation.