The Multilingual Reading Brain: An ERP Study of Language Interactions in Three Writing Systems

This study will tease apart visual and phonological overlaps in word forms in cognates with both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. Chinese/Japanese Kanji same-script cognates and English/Japanese Katakana crossscript cognates will be presented to Chinese-English-Japanese trilinguals and two control groups of Chinese-English and Japanese-English bilinguals in Hong Kong. Participants will engage in lexical decision and delayed word naming with simultaneous eye-tracking and ERP recordings. Results will clarify and contrast the roles of orthography and phonology in three languages and four scripts. Task-related differences will be reveal whether multilingual word processing is context-dependent and moderated by top-down control.

Funding Source: RGC - Early Career Scheme (ECS)