Bilingual word familiarity in Cantonese and English

Bilingual speakers are typically unbalanced in their vocabularies in each language, with each language’s lexicon being representative of the experiences and domains in which the bilingual uses that language. This can create a challenge in creating word lists for speech experiments, as the frequency counts from publicly available corpora do not represent the appropriate vocabulary domains. In this paper, we report on a word familiarity rating task in Cantonese and English that was designed to pretest stimuli in both languages to confirm the items were matched in familiarity for use in subsequent speech tasks. Participants fell into four different groups: Cantonese-English bilinguals who grew up in a Cantonese-dominant location, Cantonese-English bilinguals who grew up in an English-dominant location, North American English speakers with no Chinese language experience, and international English speakers with no Chinese language experience. All listeners were presented with blocks of Cantonese words/nonwords and English words/nonwords and were asked to rate the familiarity of each item. We compare these ratings across participant groups and in relation to corpora for each language to assess how the listener groups perform. We discuss these results in the context of designing stimuli lists that are appropriate for diverse, multilingual populations.