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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1528955
This article is part of the Research Topic Attention Mechanisms and Cross-Modal Integration in Language and Visual Cognition View all 3 articles

Perception in Context of Chinese and Japanese: The Role of Language Proficiency

Provisionally accepted
Sa Lu Sa Lu 1*Rongxia Ren Rongxia Ren 2Ting Guo Ting Guo 1*Xiaoyu Tang Xiaoyu Tang 3*
  • 1 Ningbo University of Technology, Ningbo, China
  • 2 Okayama University, Okayama, Okayama, Japan
  • 3 Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, Liaoning Province, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The effect of language context on bilinguals has been studied in phonetic production. However, it is still unclear how the language context affects phonetic perception as the level of second language (L2) proficiency increases. Chinese-Japanese auditory cognates were selected to avoid the interference of semantics and font or spelling processing. Low-to high-proficiency Chinese-Japanese bilinguals, as well as Chinese and Japanese monolinguals, were asked to judge whether the initial morpheme of the Chinese or Japanese words was pronounced with the vowels /a/ or /i/ in single-and mixed-language contexts. The results found that low-proficiency bilinguals judged vowels faster in the single-language context than in the mixed-language context, whereas highproficiency bilinguals showed no significant difference between the single-and mixed-language contexts. These results indicate that as language proficiency increases, bilinguals appear to adaptively enhance phonetic perception when faced with different control demands in single-language and mixed-language contexts.

    Keywords: Language context1, language proficiency2, Phonetic perception3, Chinese-Japanese bilinguals4, Vowel judgement5

    Received: 15 Nov 2024; Accepted: 03 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Lu, Ren, Guo and Tang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Sa Lu, Ningbo University of Technology, Ningbo, China
    Ting Guo, Ningbo University of Technology, Ningbo, China
    Xiaoyu Tang, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, 116029, Liaoning Province, China

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