The effect of categorization levels on semantic access: eye-movement evidence from unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals

The study was to investigate the effect of categorization levels on bilinguals’ semantic access, which provides evidence supporting the image-involved access model of basic-level category words. In Experiment I, randomly presented English stimuli of three levels of category (e.g., instrument-drum-base drum) were judged by unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals on whether they were live creatures or not. In Experiment II, a long-duration repetition priming paradigm was used, where English stimuli served as primes and their Chinese translation equivalents as targets. Another group of participants performed the same semantic judgement task as in Experiment I. Total fixation durations were recorded in both experiments. A one-way analysis of variance was used to analyze participants’ whole fixation durations. The results from eye-movement data showed that the effect of categorization levels existed on L2 semantic access among unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals, but not on L1 semantic access. Additionally, no significant English-Chinese (L2-L1) priming effect occurred by adopting a semantic judgement task. This study appears to be one of the first to investigate the effect of categorization levels on bilingual semantic access and provides new insight into the field of bilingual word processing.