Heritage-culture images disrupt immigrants’ second-language processing through triggering first-language interference

For bicultural individuals, visual cues of a setting’s cultural expectations can activate associated representations, switching the frames that guide their judgments. Research suggests that cultural cues may affect judgments through automatic priming, but has yet to investigate consequences for ling...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2013-07, Vol.110 (28), p.11272-11277
Main Authors: Zhang, Shu, Morris, Michael W., Cheng, Chi-Ying, Yap, Andy J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acculturation
Asian people
Bilingualism. Multilingualism
Biological and medical sciences
British culture
Chinese culture
Emigration and Immigration
Expectations
Experimentation
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Judgment
Language
Language fluency
Language translation
Legal objections
Linguistics
Noncitizens
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Second language learning
Social Sciences
Trials
Words
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Summary:For bicultural individuals, visual cues of a setting’s cultural expectations can activate associated representations, switching the frames that guide their judgments. Research suggests that cultural cues may affect judgments through automatic priming, but has yet to investigate consequences for linguistic performance. The present studies investigate the proposal that heritage-culture cues hinder immigrants’ second-language processing by priming first-language structures. For Chinese immigrants in the United States, speaking to a Chinese (vs. Caucasian) face reduced their English fluency, but at the same time increased their social comfort, effects that did not occur for a comparison group of European Americans (study 1). Similarly, exposure to iconic symbols of Chinese (vs. American) culture hindered Chinese immigrants’ English fluency, when speaking about both culture-laden and culture-neutral topics (study 2). Finally, in both recognition (study 3) and naming tasks (study 4), Chinese icon priming increased accessibility of anomalous literal translations, indicating the intrusion of Chinese lexical structures into English processing. We discuss conceptual implications for the automaticity and adaptiveness of cultural priming and practical implications for immigrant acculturation and second-language learning.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1304435110