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International audienceWe report four experiments investigating the effects of repeated and transposed letters in orthographic processing. Orthographically related primes were formed by removing one letter from the target word, by transposing two adjacent letters, or by replacing two adjacent letters with different letters. Robust masked priming in a lexical decision task was found for primes formed by removing a single letter (e.g., mircle -MIRACLE), and this was not influenced by whether or not the prime contained a letter repetition (e.g., balace vs. balnce as a prime for BALANCE ). Target words containing a repeated letter tended to be harder to respond to than words without a letter repetition, but the nonwords formed by removing a repeated letter (e.g., BALNCE) were no harder to reject than nonwords formed by removing a non-repeated letter (e.g., MIRCLE, BALACE). Significant transposition priming effects were found for 7-letter words (e.g., sevrice -SERVICE), and these priming effects did not vary as a function of the position of the transposition (initial, final, or inner letter pair). Priming effects disappeared when primes were formed by replacing the two transposed letters with different letters (e.g., sedlice -SERVICE), and five-letter words only showed priming effects with inner letter transpositions (e.g., ponit -POINT). We present a revised ``open-bigram'' scheme for letter position coding that accounts for these data

In the last decade, bilingual word processing has received increasing attention. A basic feature of being bilingual is that one often has multiple lexical representations (one in each language) for a particular meaning (e.g., dog and hond are the English and Dutch words, respectively, for the same animal). If these lexical representations are connected to either the same or overlapping semantic representations (or directly to each other), one might expect interactions between a bilingual's languages during word recognition. Indeed, there is a plethora of evidence for influences of a bilingual's first language (L1) on the processing of a second language (L2) (see below; for instance, Duyck, 2005;Keatley, Spinks, & de Gelder, 1994;Kim & Davis, 2003;Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007;Weber & Cutler, 2004). Depending on the organization of bilingual memory, a nondominant language may also influence the dominant language. The pres ent article asks whether such influences from L2 on L1 processing exist, and if so, whether they are equally strong as the influences from L1 on L2.A number of studies have observed effects from L2 on native language processing. For example, van Hell and Dijkstra (2002) showed that L1 (Dutch) targets having an L2 (English) and L3 (French) near-cognate translation equivalent (e.g., banaan-banana-banane) yielded faster lexical decision responses than did control words. However, despite the fact that these cross-language influences apparently seem to exist in both directions, it is a recurrent finding that L1 typically has more impact on L2 processing than vice versa. This well-known asymmetry has been reported in a number of studies using a wide range of paradigms (e.g., Duyck, 2005;Gollan, Forster, & Frost, 1997;Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998;Marian & Spivey, 2003;Schoonbaert et al., 2007;Weber & Cutler, 2004). For instance, it has been claimed that in a lexical decision task with translation primes, there are clear effects from L1 to L2, but no-or unreliable-effects from L2 to L1 (Gollan et al., 1997;Jiang, 1999;Jiang & Forster, 2001).A possible theoretical explanation is that words in L2 are represented and accessed in a qualitatively different way than are words in L1. For instance, in Jiang and Forster's (2001) The present study investigated cross-language priming effects with unique noncognate translation pairs. Unbalanced Dutch (first language [L1])-English (second language [L2]) bilinguals performed a lexical decision task in a masked priming paradigm. The results of two experiments showed significant translation priming from L1 to L2 (meisje-GIRL) and from L2 to L1 (girl-MEISJE), using two different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (250 and 100 msec). Although translation priming from L1 to L2 was significantly stronger than priming from L2 to L1, the latter was significant as well. Two further experiments with the same word targets showed significant cross-language semantic priming in both directions ( jongen [boy]-GIRL; boy-MEISJE [GIRL]) and for both SOAs. These data su...

In this study, English–French bilinguals performed a lexical decision task while reaction times (RTs) and event related potentials (ERPs) were measured to L2 targets, preceded by noncognate L1 translation primes versus L1 unrelated primes (Experiment 1a) and vice versa (Experiment 1b). The prime–target stimulus onset asynchrony was 120 ms. Significant masked translation priming was observed, indicated by faster reaction times and a decreased N400 for translation pairs as opposed to unrelated pairs, both from L1 to L2 (Experiment 1a) and from L2 to L1 (Experiment 1b), with the latter effect being weaker (RTs) and less longer lasting (ERPs). A translation priming effect was also found in the N250 ERP component, and this effect was stronger and earlier in the L2 to L1 priming direction than the reverse. The results are discussed with respect to possible mechanisms at the basis of asymmetric translation priming effects in bilinguals.

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