Cross-linguistic semantic transfer in bilingual Chinese-English speakers

The semantic structure of animal and emotion terms was here under investigation. In Study one, Chinese ‐ English bilinguals and monolingual English and Chinese speakers provided similarity judgments. Those, once analysed with correspondence analysis, provided a multidimensional representation of the semantic structure of animal terms; with the greatest level of similarity noted between two bilingual structures. In Study two, a within subjects design was employed and the participants evaluated levels of similarity between pairs of emotion terms. The greatest level of similarity was recorded between the bilingual judgments provided in English and the monolingual English ones. The aggregated findings have demonstrated that the bilingual semantic structures are dynamic, possibly due to the constant interaction between two languages, which in consequence may lead to creation of semantic interlanguage