The word frequency effect in first- and second-language reading by Chinese and Dutch bilinguals

High-frequency words are processed faster than low-frequency words, known as the word frequency effect (FE). Although the FE has been studied in various writing systems as well as in first- (L1) and second-language (L2) reading, existing theoretical hypotheses are mainly based on findings in alphabetic languages. To date, no study has investigated theoretical explanations of the FE such as the learning hypothesis, the lexical entrenchment hypothesis and the rank hypothesis apply to Chinese-English bilinguals. The present study, therefore, compared the FEs in Chinese- and Dutch-English bilingua... Mehr ...