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Differences in semantic and translation priming across languages: The role of language direction and language dominance

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Abstract

In the present study, we examined bilingual memory organization, using the priming paradigm. Many of the previous studies in which this experimental technique has been used in the bilingual domain appear to have had several differences in methodology that have caused there to be a lot of variation in the data reported. The aim of the present work was to create an experimental situation that was well constrained so that automatic processes could be observed. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals participated in an unmasked semantic- and translation-priming study in which a lexical decision task was used. The results revealed significant translation-priming effects in both language directions and, unexpectedly, significant semantic priming in the L2-L1 direction only. In Experiment 2, we examined semantic- and translation-priming effects with a forward mask design. The results indicated that significant priming was obtained only for translation word pairs in both language directions. These results are discussed with regard to current models of bilingual memory representation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Social Science 369, State University of New York, 12222, Albany, NY

    Dana M. Basnight-Brown & Jeanette Altarriba

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  1. Dana M. Basnight-Brown
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  2. Jeanette Altarriba
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Correspondence to Dana M. Basnight-Brown or Jeanette Altarriba.

Additional information

This work served as partial fulfillment of the Master’s of Arts Degree in Cognitive Psychology for the first author at the State University of New York at Albany. This work was presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, November 2004, Minneapolis. Our thanks to Monica L. Rodriguez for serving as a reader on this work and to Chi-Shing Tse for his assistance regarding aspects of the analyses.

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Basnight-Brown, D.M., Altarriba, J. Differences in semantic and translation priming across languages: The role of language direction and language dominance. Memory & Cognition 35, 953–965 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193468

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