Processing costs in Cantonese-Latin script-mixing

What is it about?

This paper reports a psycholinguistic study that tests how language comprehension is impacted by an emerging trend among young Cantonese speakers: In social media, it is common to insert Latin graphemes in sentences that are otherwise written in Chinese. The Latin alphabet and Chinese characters are two distinct writing system types: Chinese uses morphographic characters that largely encode meaning, while the Latin alphabets largely encode sound-based properties of a word. A self-paced reading experiment with 92 Cantonese speakers was conducted to determine whether such script-mixing results in comprehension difficulties for the reader, 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 in the non-dominant script. Test 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 an 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.

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Why is it important?

This experiment tests the impacts of an understudied, yet emerging social media phenomenon, in which young Cantonese speakers mix Latin graphemes in Chinese sentences. Results indicated that there are costs at the non-dominant script (i.e., Latin) to the dominant script (i.e., Chinese) switch, possibly due to Inhibitory Control and not Lexical Access. We suggest that these delays are mediated by the sentential position of switched items since costs were incurred in only two of four grammatical categories. Since English is indeed the lingua franca of the Internet, such script-mixing in social media contexts is likely to become increasingly common, making this genre a potentially rich area for future experimental psycholinguistic research on script-switching.