Previous research with unbalanced, different-script bilinguals has typically produced null L2-L1 noncognate masked translation priming effects in lexical decision tasks (LDT). Two novel models of the bilingual mental lexicon have emerged to account for these null results: the episodic L2 hypothesis and the Sense model. In contrast, the BIA+ model predicts significant priming whenever bilinguals are sufficiently proficient in L2. Using Japanese–English bilinguals, the role of L2 proficiency in L2-L1 noncognate translation priming in an LDT was examined. In Experiments 1 and 2, significant priming effects were observed for highly proficient bilinguals. In contrast, in Experiment 3, less-proficient bilinguals produced a null priming effect. This pattern demonstrates that L2-L1 priming effects do arise in an LDT and those effects are modulated by L2 proficiency, consistent with the BIA+ model's expectations. The pattern can be also explained by the episodic L2 hypothesis, provided that certain modifications are made to its assumptions.

Speech production research has shown that Japanese monolingual speakers use mora-sized phonological units, not phoneme-sized units, when phonologically encoding Japanese words. Recent bilingual research has indicated that proficient Japanese-English bilinguals nevertheless use phoneme-sized units when phonologically encoding English words, suggesting that use of a phonological unit that is smaller than that of their L1 develops with increasing proficiency in English. The purpose of the present research was to determine whether proficient Japanese-English bilinguals also begin to use the smaller, phoneme-sized units when producing Japanese words. In a masked priming naming task, proficient Japanese-English bilinguals produced a significant masked onset priming effect for English words, confirming that they do use phoneme-sized units when phonologically encoding in English (L2). These bilinguals, however, showed only mora-based facilitation for Japanese words in an experiment involving only Japanese words. These results suggest that proficient bilinguals use different unit sizes depending on the language being produced, and that for bilinguals whose L1 and L2 have different unit sizes, the phonological encoding process is at least somewhat different in their two languages.Key words: masked onset and mora priming effect, Japanese-English bilinguals, phonological unit-size, speech production, phonological encoding.When one speaks, representations of to-bespoken words are first accessed in the speaker's mental lexicon, and then the phonological properties of the words are retrieved and encoded before the articulation system initiates the actual act of speaking. According to Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999), the phonological encoding process occurs incrementally from word beginning to word ending by assigning phonemes to metrical frames, in which the syllable and stress patterns are specified. The information is then sent to the articulatory system for execution of motor movements. The assignment of phonemes into a metrical frame is called the segment-to-frame association process, and is the essential step for successful word production.The first empirical evidence that the phoneme is the unit used in the phonological encoding process was presented by Meyer (1991) using an "implicit priming" paradigm with Dutch stimuli. In these experiments, participants first learned a small set of semantically related word pairs (e.g., hour-time, swim-pool,

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Tunneling measurements were applied to investigate the density of states of the high Tc superconductor in the temperature range from 4.2 K to the transition temperature.Several structures were found in conductance curves in higher bias region than ever reported, and they vanished around Tc.Temperature dependence of the bias voltages at which these structures appeared showed the BCS-like behavior.

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