Within- and cross-language repetition priming in verb generation: evidence from non-proficient Chinese-English bilinguals.

The present study aims to investigate the repetition priming within and across languages in verbs among non-proficient Chinese-English bilinguals, using a verb generation task. The impact of levels of processing on repetition priming was also examined. A total of 160 non-proficient Chinese-English bilinguals participated in the experiments, generating English verbs (Experiment 1) or Chinese verbs (Experiment 2) that corresponded to the same set of 50 translation-equivalent nouns across the two languages. The results revealed significant within-language repetition priming in both deep- and shallow-encoding conditions, whereas significant cross-language repetition priming was only observed in the deep-encoding condition. Within-language repetition priming was significantly greater compared to cross-language repetition priming. In addition, repetition priming within L2 English was significantly greater than that within L1 Chinese under deep-encoding condition. Cross-language priming showed a directional asymmetry, with stronger priming from Chinese to English than from English to Chinese. These results largely indicate that verb concepts are shared across the two typologically distant languages for non-proficient Chinese-English bilinguals. Notably, the repetition priming in verbs was modulated by levels of processing, with larger priming in the deep-encoding condition than in the shallow-encoding condition.