| Summary: | <p>This study delves into the contentious issue of lexical activation and access in bilinguals, primarily focusing on whether the process is selective or nonselective. Selective activation means that only one of the two language systems in a bilingual individual is activated while processing. Conversely, nonselective activation means both language systems are activated simultaneously. While previous research largely supports the nonselective hypothesis, the roles of second language (L2) proficiency and the influence of different language scripts remain largely unexplored.</p>
<p>To elucidate these aspects, the study involved 42 Cantonese-English bilinguals, a less investigated demographic and employed a phonological relatedness judgement task, a seldom-used approach. Findings revealed that neither the direction of language priming nor the use of different scripts significantly influenced the participants’ reaction times. However, the script and direction of priming markedly impacted accuracy rates, providing new insights into cross-script bilingual word recognition. These results offer a deeper understanding of bilingual lexical access and carry significant educational and theoretical implications such as teaching English as a second language for Cantonese-English bilinguals, the awareness on the education of Jyutping and theories of bilingual language processing such as the BIA+ model.</p>
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