Representation characteristics of English psych verbs in Chinese-English bilinguals: The modulating role of language proficiency

Abstract

This study investigates the semantic representation of English psych verbs in Chinese-English bilinguals (CEBs) and how L2 proficiency modulates this process. A total of 180 CEBs, divided into low-, intermediate-, and high-proficiency groups, completed two masked priming experiments. Experiment 1 examined intralanguage semantic processing (synonym/antonym associations, word frequency effects) and found that high-proficiency learners showed a significant processing facilitation for high-frequency synonyms over antonyms, reflecting robust facilitation of high-frequency synonym priming. Experiment 2 explored interlanguage processing via Chinese-English (C-E)/English-Chinese (E-C) translation equivalents and word frequency, showing that low-proficiency participants exhibited the largest translation priming effects, particularly for high-frequency words in the C-E direction. Across all proficiency levels, intralanguage processing was generally faster than interlanguage processing, whereas interlanguage priming effects tended to be more pronounced overall. These findings reveal proficiency-dependent shifts in the interaction between semantic and frequency information, highlight translation equivalence as a core mechanism in bilingual semantic organization, and refine the distributed feature model and the shared asymmetric model by demonstrating their applicability to abstract verb categories beyond the concrete nouns on which they were originally developed.