Previous studies have shown that prior linguistic knowledge affects semantic implicit learning when stimuli are presented in the first language. We report an experiment that investigated whether such crosslinguistic influence from the first language would still emerge in the second language for semantic implicit learning of novel articles and fire/water semantic category mappings, a semantic distinction that is explicitly marked by semantic radicals in Chinese but not in English and a type of form–meaning connections that has not been investigated. We found that 30 Cantonese–English bilinguals and 30 native English speakers learned the target form–meaning connections and that the knowledge that they developed may have been implicit, as shown through post-experiment verbal reports. Moreover, the bilingual group was significantly faster than the English group in distinguishing fire/water English nouns. These findings extend the range of semantic-based regularities that can be learned at the implicit level and suggest that the markings of fire/water distinctions in Chinese affect second language task performance.

中文翻译：

---

先前语言知识对第二语言语义内隐学习的影响：来自粤英双语者的证据

先前的研究表明，当刺激以第一语言呈现时，先前的语言知识会影响语义内隐学习。我们报告了一项实验，调查第一语言的这种跨语言影响是否仍然会出现在第二语言中，用于小说文章的语义内隐学习和火/水语义类别映射，这是一种由汉语语义部首明确标记的语义区别，但不是英语中的“形式-意义”联系尚未被研究过。我们发现，30 名粤英双语者和 30 名以英语为母语的人学习了目标形式-意义联系，并且他们所掌握的知识可能是隐性的，如实验后口头报告所示。而且，双语组在区分火/水英语名词方面明显快于英语组。这些发现扩展了可以在内隐水平学习的基于语义的规律的范围，并表明汉语中火/水区别的标记会影响第二语言任务的表现。