Tip-of-the-pen states in Mandarin handwriting: The effect of brief non-target language exposure.

The tip-of-the-pen (TOP) is a phenomenon in which individuals fail to completely retrieve the orthographic information of a known character, and mainly occurs in Mandarin (a non-alphabetic language in which the orthography is largely independent of the phonology). The present study examined whether and how long-term language experience and brief exposure to non-target language affected TOP rates in Mandarin handwriting. In Experiment 1, high and low proficiency Mandarin-English bilinguals completed a Mandarin character dictation task before and after watching a short English movie. The results revealed similar increases in TOP rates for both groups following the English movie. In Experiment 2, Cantonese-Mandarin bidialectals and native Mandarin speakers completed a protocol similar to Experiment 1, but the movie was replaced with a Cantonese movie. Notably, TOP rates significantly increased for bidialectals after the Cantonese movie, but the rates of incorrect responses increased for native speakers. These findings suggest that brief exposure to non-target language exerted a non-item-specific, global interference effect in written production, and also imply that the underlying mechanisms may be modulated by non-target language familiarity.