Abstract
The present study aimed to test the Sense Model of cross-linguistic masked translation priming asymmetry, proposed by Finkbeiner et al. (J Mem Lang 51:1–22, 2004), by manipulating the number of senses that bilingual participants associated with words from both languages. Three lexical decision experiments were conducted with Chinese-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, polysemous L2 words and their L1 Chinese single-sense translation equivalents were selected as primes and targets. In Experiment 2, single-sense L1 words and their L2 translation equivalents with polysemous senses severed as primes and targets. We found translation priming effects in the L1–L2 direction, but not in the L2–L1 direction. In Experiment 3, presentation time of the L2 priming stimulus was prolonged, and significant translation priming effects were observed in the L2–L1 direction. These findings suggest that the Sense Model does not adequately explain cross-language translation priming asymmetry. The sense numbers of primes and targets, as well as the activation proportion of these senses between them, were possibly not the primary reason for cross-language translation priming asymmetry. The revised hierarchical model (Kroll and Stewart in J Mem Lang 33:149–174, 1994) and the BIA+ model (Dijkstra and van Heuven in Bilingualism Lang Cognit 5:175–197, 2002) better explain the cross-language translation priming asymmetry we found.
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Notes
Rodd et al. (2002) regarded a word with only one entry in the Wordsmyth Dictionary (http://www.wordsmyth.net/) as polysemous with related meanings, whereas a word with more than two entries was regarded as having different meanings. Of our 28 prime stimuli, only the word “key” has two entries in the Wordsmyth Dictionary, but the meaning of one of the two entries is very rare. Thus, the word “key” can also be regarded as polysemous. Therefore, all the 28 prime stimuli in the present study are polysemous words.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the fund of The National Social Science Fund (11BYY039), the Central University Basic Scientific Research Fund, the Program for New Century Excellent Talents of Ministry of Education in China (NECT-11-0028) and the Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology.
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Chen, B., Zhou, H., Gao, Y. et al. Cross-Language Translation Priming Asymmetry with Chinese-English Bilinguals: A Test of the Sense Model. J Psycholinguist Res 43, 225–240 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-013-9249-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-013-9249-3