Article In:
The Mental Lexicon: Online-First ArticlesProcessing costs in Cantonese-Latin script-mixing
An emerging trend among young Cantonese speakers is to script-mix morphographic Chinese characters with Latin
graphemes in social media exchanges, uncommon in traditional Chinese contexts. Results of a self-paced reading experiment with
Cantonese speakers are reported to determine whether script-mixing incurs processing costs, and if so, whether these can be
attributed to Inhibitory Control of one of the two scripts or to Dual Activation of both scripts but with slower lexical access
within the non-dominant script. Sentences were presented either entirely in Chinese characters or had one region presented in
Latin graphemes. Processing costs arose only at the switch from Latin graphemes back to Chinese characters, pointing to the
involvement of Inhibitory Control. Further, these costs only appeared in a subset of grammatical categories, potentially
coinciding with parsing uncertainties. As such, a combination of script-mixing and parsing complexities could be seen to result in
processing costs in certain sentential positions.
Keywords: processing costs, script-mixing, Cantonese-English code-switching, electronic literacy, social media
Article outline
- Introduction
- Methods
- Participants
- Materials and procedure
- Results
- Discussion
- Conclusion
- Replication package
- Acknowledgements
- Author queries
-
References
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