Semantic and translation priming from a first language to a second and back: Making sense of the findings

Abstract

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...

Making sense of the Sense Model

“…Again, these participants were all considerably higher in L2 proficiency than the present Japanese-English bilinguals. Schoonbaert et al (2009) reported L2 to L1 masked priming in lexical decision with Dutch-English bilinguals and Schoonbaert et al (2011) reported a similar finding with English-French bilinguals. In these studies, noncognates were used to minimize the role of formal overlap between prime-target translations.…”

“…While priming was observed in both tasks, the priming effect was smaller in semantic priming than in translation priming. Schoonbaert et al (2009) argued that the difference between tasks arose due to translation prime-targets sharing more conceptual features than semantically related prime-targets (also see de Groot & Nas, 1991;Perea, Dunãbeitia & Carreiras, 2008). While these findings highlight the importance of overlapping semantic features, the argument that the degree of semantic overlap between L2 and L1 translations is the only requirement for L2 to L1 priming (i.e., Finkbeiner et al, 2004) does not account for the current pattern of results.…”

“…Schoonbaert et al (2009) offer convincing evidence that this is the case. In their study, they observed significant priming effects for noncognates in both L1 to L2 and L2 to L1 directions in two tasks, masked translation priming with lexical decision (we return specifically to this later) and masked semantic priming with lexical decision, with Dutch-English bilinguals.…”

Non-cognate translation priming effects in the same–different task: evidence for the impact of “higher level” information

“…A non-cognate priming effect of this size is not, however, uncommon when same-script bilinguals are tested (e.g., Schoonbaert, Duyck, Brysbaert, & Hartsuiker, 2009, Experiment 1, 100 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) condition: 19 ms effect; de Groot and Nas, 1991, Experiment 4, lower case prime and upper case target condition: 22 ms effect) and, in fact, there are several reports in the literature of an inability to find priming in similar situations Sánchez-Casas & García-Albea, 2005). Therefore, looked at from an entirely empirical perspective, one can certainly argue that any priming effect that might have emerged in the same-different task would have been of a fairly small size and potentially difficult to detect.…”

“…A straightforward explanation of this difference is that translation priming effects with non-cognates are often weak or nonexistent for same-script bilinguals (e.g., Davis et al, 2010;de Groot & Nas, 1991;Sánchez-Casas & García-Albea, 2005;Schoonbaert et al, 2009). Therefore, it would be unlikely that Spanish-English bilinguals would show a significant translation priming effect in a same-different task, a task in which one would expect a smaller translation priming effect than the effect found in lexical decision (as documented by the comparison between the present Experiments 3 and 4).…”