Xin Wang
PhD Candidate
Second Language Acquisition and Teaching GIDP

5th International Conference of Mental Lexicon
October 11-13, 2006, Montreal, Canada

ABSTRACT
In the bilingual masked priming literature, it has been shown that translation priming across languages with different scripts can only be observed in one direction (L1-L2) in lexical decision; however, translation priming of both directions (L1-L2 and L2-L1) in semantic categorization is reliably obtained. This type of task-dependent L2-L1 translation priming is explained by the Sense Model (Finkbeiner, M., Forster, K., Nicol, J., & Nakamura, K., 2004), which assumes a representational asymmetry between L1 and L2 semantic representations, such that L1 has more richly populated semantic representations than L2. According to this view, L2-L1 priming is not observed in lexical decision due to the small proportion of L1 senses activated by the L2 prime. In semantic categorization, it is argued that the category provides a context which restricts L1 sense activation and thus enhances the effectiveness of the L2 prime. However, it is possible that the priming effect in semantic categorization is actually a congruence effect produced by an implicit categorization of the prime. The first experiment controls for possible congruence effects by using L2 primes that are exemplars of the category but not translation equivalents of the targets, compared with L2 primes which are either translation equivalents or unrelated to the targets. The results replicated previous studies. The second experiment attempts to test the sense selection assumption by using a category that requires explicit conceptual level processing, but is too broad to effectively focus L1 sense activation. The task used is “Bigger than a Brick” in which subjects classify words according to whether the referent is bigger than a brick or not. The results showed significant L1-L2 priming, but no L2-L1 priming. It can be concluded that what is crucial to obtain L2-L1 priming is the type of category, not the process of categorization itself. Finkbeiner, M., Forster, K., Nicol, J., & Nakamura, K. (2004). The role of polysemy in masked semantic and translation priming. Journal of Memory & Language, 51(1), 1­ 22.