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Paper short abstract

This study examines the reception of shared sinographic compounds in Chinese and Japanese using a masked translation priming experiment with Chinese–Japanese bilinguals. Results show recognition of these words varies systematically with the degree of orthographic overlap and the processing stage.

Paper long abstract

Japanese writing has developed through long-term contact with sinograms, resulting in a vast shared lexicon of sinographic compounds in Mandarin Chinese (hereafter, Chinese) and Japanese. While these items typically share semantic and orthographic properties but differ phonologically, existing research has largely focused on descriptive contrastive linguistics rather than real-time cognitive processing. From a psycholinguistic perspective, these cross-language translation equivalents are often treated as cognates, defined by functional form–meaning similarity rather than etymological origin. Following this approach, this study examines the Chinese-Japanese shared sinographic compounds composed of two sinograms, focusing on the role of orthographic overlap in bilingual lexical access. While previous studies have reported that cognates are more easily processed than noncognates, most evidence stems from alphabetic writing systems, where orthography and phonology closely interact. Chinese–Japanese two-sinogram cognates therefore provide a useful case for examining orthographic effects with reduced phonological correspondence. The study reports a masked translation priming experiment in which Chinese (first language: L1)–Japanese (second language: L2) bilinguals performed a semantic categorization task on Japanese target words. To delineate the time course of lexical activation, prime duration was manipulated at two levels (33 ms vs. 50 ms) across four conditions: orthographically identical cognates (e.g., 学生, “student”), orthographically nonidentical cognates (e.g., 价值 vs. 価値, “value”), noncognates (e.g., 行李 vs. 荷物, “luggage”), and unrelated pairs (肥皂 vs. 息子, “soap vs. son”). At the 33 ms prime duration, both identical and nonidentical cognates were processed faster than unrelated pairs, whereas non-cognates were not, indicating that early priming arose solely from orthography. At the 50 ms prime duration, identical cognates maintained a robust processing advantage compared to both nonidentical cognates and noncognates, whereas the priming effect from nonidentical cognates was comparable to that from noncognates. These results demonstrate that the cognitive reception of shared sinographic compounds is highly sensitive to the degree of orthographic overlap and processing stage. While initial lexical activation is non-selective and driven by orthographic similarity, language-specific formal constraints emerge to modulate this activation as processing unfolds, offering new insights into the dynamics of the bilingual mental lexicon.