Jack or Zack: Bilingual experience and lexical encoding of English /dʒ-z/ in Korean bilinguals

Abstract

This study examines the perceptual discrimination and lexical encoding of the English /dʒ–z/ contrast in Korean–English bilinguals, aiming to tease apart the roles of early exposure and misperception in shaping bilingual lexical representations. The English /dʒ–z/ contrast is not contrastive in Korean and is typically neutralized and adapted as the lenis affricate /c/ [t͡s] in Korean loanwords. We test heritage bilinguals with early exposure to Korean and later dominance in English in comparison to native Korean and English speakers. Participants completed a lexical decision task involving cross-modal priming followed by an auditory AX discrimination task. In critical lexical decision trials, a visual orthographic target (e.g., Zack) was presented following one of three types of auditory primes: Match (identical to the target: Zack), Mismatch (a minimal pair of the target: Jack), or Control (unrelated to the target: gear). In the auditory AX discrimination task, the same participants were tested on their ability to auditorily discriminate between the minimal pairs used in the lexical decision task. The Heritage group performed similarly to the native Korean group in the lexical decision task, even though they performed similarly to the native English group in the AX discrimination task, unlike the native Korean group. The Heritage group’s performance supports the view that early exposure to a language can play a critical role in shaping lexical representations, even when language dominance shifts to another language later in life.