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Native Chinese readers activate Englishtranslations of words during Chinese sentencereadingMing Yan 1,2 , Yue Xi 3 , Yingyi Luo 4 and Jinger Pan 31 DepartmentofPsychology,UniversityofMacau,Macau,P.R.China; 2 CenterforCognitiveandBrainSciences,Universityof Macau, Macau, P. R. China;3 Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, P. R.China and4 Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, P. R. ChinaAbstractThis study tested whether native Chinese (L1) readers whose second language (L2) was Englishcould activate L2 translations of L1 words during L1 sentence reading. Chinese–Englishbilinguals read Chinese sentences silently, each containing a target word whose parafovealpreview was manipulated. To test cross-language semantic activation, each target word waspaired with an identical, an unrelated and a translation-related preview that shared an L2translation(e.g.,政黨,partyasapoliticalgroup)withthetargetword(e.g.,派對,partyasasocialgathering). Compared to the unrelated previews, the translation-related previews inducedshortertarget-wordviewingtimes,despitenophonological/orthographic overlap.Furthermore,thehighlyproficientL2readersshowedearlierprimingeffectsthandidtheaveragereaders.Ourresults suggest that bilinguals activate lexical representations in both languages automaticallyandnon-selectively,evenwhenthetaskrequiresactivationofonelanguageonly,andthattheL2lexical activation is modulated by L2 proficiency.Highlights1. Chinese–English bilinguals activate L2 ambiguous translations of words in L1 reading.2. L2 proficiency modulates the cross-language translation-related preview effect.3. Lexical processing of a word in both languages appears before a word is fixated on.1. IntroductionOne theoretically important question in the field of bilingual research is whether bilingualsunconsciouslyandnon-selectivelyactivatebothlanguagesinavarietyofcontexts.Dependingonthe situation, one may need to use either or both languages. The current models of bilinguallexical access favor a bottom-up driven, nonselective view, that is, representations of words inboth languages are activated in parallel early on. The suppression of nontarget representationshappensinalatertemporalstage(e.g.,Dijkstraetal.,2019;Dijkstra&VanHeuven,2002).Severalstudies of individual word identification have supported the simultaneous activation of repre-sentations in both languages. These findings came from studies examining cross-languageorthographic and phonological processing, code switching, translation priming, etc. (e.g., Jared&Kroll,2001;Litcofsky&VanHell,2017;Marian&Spivey,2003).Someotherstudies,however,have suggested that bilingual activation can occur at the lexico-conceptual representation level(Jiang, 2002, 2004; Jouravlev & Jared, 2020; Kim & Kim, 2018; Miwa et al., 2014; Thierry & Wu,2007). In general, the translation priming effect is stronger in the L1-L2 direction than in theL2-L1 direction (see Wen & van Heuven, 2017 for a meta-analysis). In an English-only primingtask, Thierry and Wu (2007) found that Chinese–English bilingual readers benefited more fromprimes that shared a Chinese character with the target translations than from those that did not.This suggests that the first language (L1) is activated during word recognition in a pure secondlanguage(L2)context,evenintheabsenceofanyL1visualcues.However,lessisknownaboutL2activation in a pure L1 context.Similar findings have also been reported during more natural sentence reading tasks usingeye-tracking techniques (Libben & Titone, 2009; Van Assche et al., 2011). For example, Friesenet al. (2020) tested English readers with varying degrees of French proficiency. They replacedEnglish target words in sentences with French interlingual homophones (e.g., mot in French,meaning “word” and pronounced similarly to mow in English) in English sentences. Comparedtoacontrolcondition (e.g., moisinFrench meaning “month”),theyfound thatreaders could usethe shared phonology of the homophones to infer the correct English target word. Furthermore,themagnitudeoftheeffectdependedonfactorssuchaswordfrequencyandparticipants’Frenchproficiency. This finding aligns with the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model,Bilingualism: Language andCognitioncambridge.org/bilResearch ArticleCite this article: Yan, M., Xi, Y., Luo, Y. andPan, J. (2026). Native Chinese readers activateEnglish translations of words during Chinesesentence reading. Bilingualism: Language andCognition 29, 699–710. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728925100382Received: 23 July 2024Revised: 2 July 2025Accepted: 7 July 2025First published online: 6 August 2025Keywords:parafoveal processing; bilingual; semantics;translation; Chinese; EnglishCorresponding author:Jinger Pan;Email: jpan@eduhk.hkThis research article was awarded OpenData and Open Materials badges fortransparent practices. See the Data AvailabilityStatement for details.©TheAuthor(s), 2025.Published byCambridgeUniversity Press. This is an Open Access article,distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), whichpermits unrestricted re-use, distribution andreproduction, provided the original article isproperly cited.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728925100382Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 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