Biscriptal Interference: A Study of English and Japanese

Abstract

It was once assumed that alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic scripts could be clearly differentiated in terms of their respective processing demands, but recent evidence suggests that, as visual stimuli, they all draw upon common “configurational” processing resources. Two experiments are reported which address this issue. Both employ cross-lingual interference paradigms, with the rationale that competition for limited processing resources will be reflected in the degree of interference generated when two scripts are presented simultaneously. The experiments differ in terms of task requirements, the first being a word-naming task, biased towards reliance upon the more rule-based decoding skills; whereas the second is a colour naming task, with a more configurational bias. In the first study, the locus of the interference effect was clearly pre-lexical, and interference was only generated by those scripts that could feasibly draw upon grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules. No interference was generated by logographs that could be accessed “directly” without recourse to any prelexical phonological code. In the second study, the locus of interference was twofold: early in processing, as a result of competition for configurational processes, and later, phonological output competition prior to articulation. These results clearly demonstrate major differences in the ways in which logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts are processed.