Asymmetrical cross-language priming effects

Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to examine cross-language priming in bilinguals. The first was a cross-language primed lexical decision task experiment with Chinese-English bilinguals. Subjects made lexical decisions about primary associate targets in the two languages at the same rate, but priming occurred only when the prime was in their first language (Ll), Chinese, and the target was in their second language (L2), English. Experiment 2 produced the same pattern of asymmetrical priming with two alphabetic languages, French and Dutch. In Experiment 3, the crucial stimuli were translation equivalents. In contrast to the results of Experiments 1 and 2, priming occurred across languages in both the LI-L2 and L2-Ll conditions. However, this priming was also asymmetrical, with more priming occurring in the LI-L2 condition. A tentative separate-interconnected model of bilingual memory is described. It suggests that the representations of words expressed in different languages are stored in separate memory systems, which may be interconnected via one-to-one links between some translation-equivalent representations as well as meaning-integration processes.Bilinguals are able to communicate in either of two languages without experiencing constant intrusions from the inactive language. Yet when a bilingual learns something via one language, there appears to be access to that knowledge via the other language. How can the language systems be kept separate in practice and still share the same information? Are the languages represented as separate, independent modules in memory? Or, are all languages represented in a shared, interdependent semantic module? These questions have important implications for an understanding of bilingual behavior and for more general models of memory and representation.In 1963, Kolers formalized the question and integrated it into psychological issues of representation by proposing a shared-separate dichotomy. He suggested that the representations of words expressed in different languages either are stored in discrete independent memory systems or take totally abstract forms, such as propositions, and are shared by words in the two languages.We would like to thank the staff of Hong Kong University who served as subjects in Experiment 1 and the students and staff of the Center for Life and Learning of Louvain University for their help in carrying out Experiments 2 and 3. We would also like to thank Annette de Groot and David Balota for their comments on earlier versions of the paper, as well as MaryPotter, Judith Kroll, and a third reviewer for their comments on this paper. Correspondence should beaddressed to C. W. Keatley,

Cognitive integration of language and memory in bilinguals: Semantic representation.

“…These and additional studies also showed that translation-equivalent primes facilitated lexical decisions relative to unrelated primes under normal (Altarriba, 1992;Frenck-Mestre & Vaid, 1992;Gollan, Forster, & Frost, 1997;Keatley et al, 1994;Williams, 1994) or deadline (Keatley & de Gelder, 1992) testing procedures. For noncognate translation equivalents, the degree of priming was less than (about 68% of) that observed with identical (same-language) primes (de Groot & Nas, 1991;Frenck-Mestre & Vaid, 1992;Gollan et al, 1997).…”

“…Between-language facilitation was substantial relative to unprimed targets at an SOA of 500 ms (Frenck & Pynte, 1987). There have also been some discrepant nonsignificant crosslanguage facilitation effects within the same studies at SOAs ranging from 60 ms to 2,000 ms (de Groot & Nas, 1991;Grainger & Beauvillain, 1988 10 ; Keatley et al, 1994) or when a deadline procedure was used (Keatley & de Gelder, 1992).…”

“…Kirsner et al (1984) took the high degree of cross-language associative priming as evidence for an integrated semantic network. Keatley and associates (Keatley & de Gelder, 1992;Keatley et al, 1994) argue that the cross-language priming does not indicate shared semantic representation, but that instead "post-lexical meaning integration," a comparison of the meanings of the prime and target at a higher-than-word level, is responsible for the priming effect. However, as Kroll (1993) points out, even if post-lexical meaning integration is responsible for the effect, the two items from different languages must converge on units in a common conceptual system for the comparison to be made.…”

“…Another interesting aspect of both the associate and translation priming data sets, emphasized or meta-analyzed by some of the authors (e.g., Gollan et al, 1997;Keatley et al, 1994;Kroll & Sholl, 1992), is the asymmetry in transfer between the stronger and weaker languages. Typically, the magnitude of the priming effect is greater from the stronger to the weaker than from the weaker to the stronger language, although the interpretation of this pattern is complicated by the longer control-condition response times in the weaker language, which leave more room for improvement.…”

The crosslinguistic assessment of foreign language vocabulary learning

“…An obvious explanation for this effect is that the concurrent study of several foreign languages can lead to a dilution in attentional resources during the learning process, thus resulting in weaker connections to the semantic representations in each language by adding more noise to the whole system. This is in accordance with multilingual interactive activation models (Grainger & Dijkstra, 1992;Keatley, Spinks & de Gelder, 1994) in that it suggests that the strength of intralingual connections needs to be developed slowly over time. If a student is exposed to both Russian and French vocabulary simultaneously, it will take some time to strengthen the links of each Russian word to the other Russian words and each French word to the other French words, so that these links will come to dominate over any potential links between languages or against background noise.…”