The development on transposed-letter effect in English word recognition: Evidence from Late unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals

The present study examined the orthographic processing of English visual word recognition in adult Chinese-speaking English learners under the framework of the multiple-route model of reading development. Two groups of adult learners with high and low English proficiency finished a forward-masked lexical decision task. The results showed a complicated scenario on transposed-letter effects, implying that the late unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals with low English proficiency still needed to adopt a letter-to-letter reading strategy, and that the L2 users with high English proficiency also had not properly developed the fine-grained orthographic route even they had a long experience of English learning in the foreign language learning settings in China. Overall, it is suggested that late unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals generally follow a path similar to that of native readers in acquiring English visual word recognition skills developed from the letter-to-letter reading strategy to the parallel orthographic processing strategies. However, since L2 users usually have no or limited spoken vocabulary of English before accessing printed words and inadequate supervision in developing L2 word reading skills, their development would be much slower than that of English native speakers. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.