Cross-linguistic phonological activation in Chinese– English–Korean trilinguals

Abstract

This study investigates whether phonological similarity alone can drive cross-linguistic activation across non-native languages in trilingual lexical processing. Using a masked priming lexical decision task, we examined phonological priming from English (L2) to Korean (L3) in Chinese–English–Korean unbalanced trilinguals. Critically, homophone pairs were employed to minimize semantic and orthographic overlap, allowing for a clearer examination of phonological priming than previous studies relying on cognates. The results showed a robust phonological priming effect between non-native languages, suggesting that phonological information alone can trigger cross-linguistic activation. In addition, proficiency was treated as a continuous variable, with L2 and L3 proficiency showing dissociable effects: higher L3 proficiency facilitated lexical access, whereas higher L2 proficiency was associated with slower response times, suggesting increased cross-language competition. Overall, the present study demonstrates that phonological representations are shared between non-native languages, supporting non-selective cross-linguistic activation in trilingual lexical processing, and highlights the important role of proficiency in lexical processing. These findings are discussed within the framework of bilingual and trilingual models of lexical access and provide further insights into the development of more refined models of trilingual lexical processing.