Representations of numerals in Tibetan–Mandarin bilinguals

Abstract

Adopting a cross-language long-term repetition-priming paradigm, the current study systematically investigated number representation in Tibetan–Mandarin bilinguals. The study focused on three types of numerals: Arabic digits, Tibetan numerals, and Mandarin numerals. Experiment 1 examined lexical representation; participants performed a lexical decision task in the cross-language repetition-priming paradigm. Experiment 2 used a parity judgment task to examine conceptual representation. In both experiments, if the presentation of the numerals during the learning phase facilitated responses to their translation equivalents in the testing phase, it would indicate that they activate each other (i.e., a shared representation). Results showed that the presentation of Tibetan or Mandarin numerals did not facilitate subsequent responses to the Arabic digit equivalent. No cross-language repetition-priming effect between Tibetan and Mandarin numerals was found in the lexical decision task, indicating that Arabic digits, Tibetan number words, and Mandarin number words are stored separately at the lexical level. At the conceptual level, the results were quite the opposite, suggesting that these three types of numerals share a common representation. To sum up, the results imply that bilinguals’ number representation is similar to bilinguals’ language representation, providing a better understanding of number representation in bilinguals from a linguistic perspective.