ABSTRACT

Bilinguals can be proficient in oral language without necessarily knowing how to read and write in at least one of their languages. Literacy has been shown to affect language processing in monolinguals. In the present study, we test if literacy affects grammaticality judgments for Cantonese–English bilinguals who varied in Chinese literacy abilities. There are grammatical differences between oral Cantonese and written Chinese (e.g. modal verb placement). We compared response times for Chinese sentences that were either congruent or incongruent in spoken and written grammaticality. We found that for some incongruent sentences, proficient readers had significantly slower response times than congruent sentences. Unproficient readers were not affected by the grammaticality of the written form. These results show that literacy within a language can impact spoken language processing.

摘要

双语者可以精通口语，但不一定知道如何用他们的至少一种语言读写。读写能力已被证明会影响单语者的语言处理。在本研究中，我们测试了读写能力是否会影响汉语读写能力不同的粤英双语者的语法判断。粤语口语和书面汉语在语法上存在差异（例如情态动词的位置）。我们比较了口语和书面语法一致或不一致的中文句子的响应时间。我们发现，对于一些不一致的句子，熟练的读者的响应时间明显慢于一致的句子。不熟练的读者不受书面形式的语法影响。