Automatic phonological access among bilinguals with cross-script languages.

This article investigates cross-script phonological activation in Chinese L1–English L2 bilinguals, examining whether phonological information is accessed nonselectively across logographic (Chinese) and alphabetic (English) writing systems. Through three experiments—a masked priming lexical decision task (LDT), a word naming task, and a self-paced sentence reading task (SPRT)—the study found significant phonological priming effects from Chinese to English but not from English to Chinese in isolated word recognition tasks. In sentence reading, a homophone interference effect emerged in the spill-over region, suggesting activation of Chinese phonology during English sentence processing despite a monolingual context. These results support the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model's claim of an integrated bilingual lexicon that operates independently of script similarity, while also highlighting asymmetries likely influenced by language proficiency, orthographic differences, and phonological processing characteristics of Chinese and English.