Çeviri öğrencileri Türkçe ve İngilizce kelimeleri görsel olarak algılarken ortaya çıkan semantik erişim: Semantik Simon yaklaşımı

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate semantic meaning activation in L1 and L2 during low-level word processing, i.e., case judgment tasks using the semantic Simon paradigm. Turkish-English bilingual participants who were divided into two “translators” and “bilinguals” were asked to judge target words’ letter cases by responding “animal” to uppercase targets and “occupation” to lowercase targets. The findings of the study were in line with the previous results in which faster responses were obtained both in the first language (L1) and second language (L2) when the verbal response corresponded to the semantic category, although semantic content was irrelevant to the task itself. In other words, faster responses were observed in congruent condition (e.g., verbal response “animal” to DOG) than incongruent condition (e.g., verbal response “animal” to SOLDIER). There was not any significant effect of the group (either translator or bilingual) on both response times and accuracy. Groups’ mean response times did not differ significantly from each other both in L1 and L2. Consequently, the present study supports the view that semantic access and form-to-meaning mappings may occur automatically and fast in L2 as they do in L1, and it may be possible that lexical representations of words in both languages may develop direct semantic access while student translators process the words visually.