Previous research has provided evidence for cross-language phonological activation during visual word recognition. However, such findings mainly came from alphabetic languages, and readers’ familiarity with the two scripts might differ. The present study aimed to test whether such cross-language phonological activation can be observed in Chinese, a logographic script, without the confounding factor of script familiarity as readers read the same script in different languages. Cantonese–Mandarin bilinguals were tested in an eye-tracking experiment in which they were instructed to read sentences silently. A target word in the sentence was replaced by either a homophone in both Cantonese and Mandarin, a homophone in Cantonese or in Mandarin only, or an unrelated character. The results showed that native Cantonese readers could activate phonological representations of L1 and L2 while reading Chinese sentences silently. However, the degree to which they relied on phonological decoding in L1 and L2 varied in the two languages.

先前的研究为视觉单词识别过程中的跨语言语音激活提供了证据。然而，这些发现主要来自字母语言，读者对两种文字的熟悉程度可能有所不同。本研究旨在测试这种跨语言的语音激活是否可以在中文（一种表意文字）中观察到，而不会受到读者用不同语言阅读相同文字时文字熟悉程度的混杂因素的影响。粤语-普通话双语者接受了一项眼球追踪实验，要求他们默读句子。句子中的目标词被替换为粤语和普通话的同音字、仅粤语或普通话的同音字、或不相关的字符。结果表明，以粤语为母语的读者在默读中文句子时可以激活母语和母语的语音表征。然而，他们对 L1 和 L2 语音解码的依赖程度在这两种语言中有所不同。