The Stroop Effect in English-Japanese Bilinguals: Unintentional Phonological Processing

Hiromi Sumiya and Alice F. Healy

Abstract for paper presented at
Processing of Chinese and Other East Asian Languages
Hong Kong
December 5, 2005

English-Japanese bilinguals performed a Stroop color-word interference task with both English and Japanese stimuli and responded in both English and Japanese. The Japanese stimuli were either the traditional color terms (TCTs) written in Hiragana or loanwords (LWs) from English written in Katakana. Both within-language and between-language interference were found for all combinations of stimuli and responses. The between-language interference was larger for LWs (phonologically similar to English) than for TCTs, especially with Japanese responses. The magnitude of this phonological effect increased with self-rated reading fluency in Japanese. Overall responding was slower and the Stroop effect larger with English than with Japanese stimuli. These results support the conclusion that unintentional lexical access elicits automatic phonological processing even with intermediate-level reading proficiency.

Hiromi Sumiya is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado. She can be reached at hiromi.sumiya@colorado.edu.

Colorado Research in Linguistics - Volume 19, Issue 1 - June 2006