Chinese-English bilinguals’ sensitivity to the time of an action event is related to the extent of their experience with English

Chen, J. 1 , Su, J. 1 , Lee, C. 2 & Lee, Y. 2

1 National Cheng Kung University
2 Ohio University

Our previous work found that Chinese speakers were less likely than English speakers to give the expected answer when asked to describe the time of an action event (i.e., whether an event is about to happen, is happening, or has happened; Chen, Su, & O’Seaghdha, submitted). Specifically, Chinese speakers tended to describe a past and a future event with the form (zai + V) that is used to describe an ongoing event. We hypothesized that Chinese speakers maintain an extended-present time window which encompasses the near future and the recent past. Consistent with the hypothesis, we also observed that future and past were more compressed to present in the Chinese speakers’ responses than in the English speakers’ responses when they were asked to mark the point of time of a future, past, and a present event. In the present study, we extended this work by comparing the performances of Chinese-English bilinguals with high and low English proficiency and English monolinguals on a task that required them to choose one of two pictures that matched the sentence they just read. Each target sentence (in Chinese or in English) described a particular time of an action event. The two pictures differed only with respect to the event time. Filler sentences and pictures were also included, which described the gender or the profession of a person. The results based on response accuracy showed that the Chinese-English bilinguals with high English proficiency performed better than those with low proficiency, but similarly as the English monolinguals. In conjunction with our previous findings, we suggest that Chinese speakers’ sensitivity to the time of an action event is related to their language experience, and that this sensitivity might be modifiable according to the extent of their experience with a tensed language.