Literacy within a language affects bilinguals’ spoken language processing: evidence from grammaticality judgments

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.

KEYWORDS:

• literacy
• grammaticality judgments
• Cantonese

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by a Discovery Grant to the first author from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Chris Westbury and Cyrus Shaoul gave us feedback on an earlier version of our experimental design. Patrick Bolger kindly programmed the sentence presentation program and helped find the data when we were done testing. This study was run in the Centre for Comparative Linguistics at the University of Alberta. Yang Fang typed out the sentences in Chinese for the Appendix. Stephen Matthews and K. K. Luke helped clarify our understanding of the differences between written Chinese and spoken Cantonese.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number 2018-04978].

Notes on contributors

Elena Nicoladis

Elena Nicoladis is a professor of psychology at the University of Alberta.

Pui Ting Chan

Pui Ting Chan worked on this study when she was an undergraduate student at the University of Alberta.