Bilingual Representation of Speech Sounds in Chinese-Japanese Bilinguals

This study is to explore the speech processing of second language. Chinese-Japanese bilinguals were selected to detect the characteristics of bilingual speech processing and bilingual representation through a vowel-identifying behavioural experiment. In this experiment, selected Japanese and Chinese words were double-character word with the same syllables and patterns. Examinees were asked to determine whether the first syllable of each word is pronounced as a vowel. Therein, the words fall into high-frequency and low-frequency ones. The results coincided with the supposition that differences in speech processing can be attributed to personally diverse understanding of speech sounds; and results in terms of lingual representation were in agreement with the viewpoint that language proficiency, language acquisition methods and exposure to the very language will affect lingual representation.