Effect of bilingualism on colour perception : is categorical perception specific to each language system or altered and shared in one unified system?

Abstract

This study seeks to gain a deeper understanding on how language is represented in a bilingual’s brain by investigating on colour boundaries that exist only in either language of the selected language pair. Twenty Korean-English bilinguals took part in the study and the results showed that categorical perception (CP) effect was still present under the non-target language primed condition. CP is therefore, not specific to each language system. The present findings also suggest that there exists a unified system where accessibility of lexical retrieval is dependent on frequency of word usage and immersion in a L2 speaking country. Furthermore, the acquisition of a second language may cause L1 attrition, weakening the strength of the word-referent mapping. Nevertheless, the weakened mapping did not result in the loss of a CP boundary in the subjects of this study.