Individual differences in bilingual word recognition: The role of experiential factors and word frequency in cross-language lexical priming

Adel Chaouch-Orozco,Jason Rothman,Jorge González Alonso

doi:10.1017/s014271642000082x

Abstract

AbstractIn studies of bilingual word recognition with masked priming, first language (L1) primes activate their second language (L2) translation equivalents in lexical decision tasks, but effects in the opposite direction are weaker (Wen & van Heuven, 2017). This study seeks to clarify the relative weight of stimulus-level (frequency) and individual-level (L2 proficiency, L2 exposure/use) factors in the emergence of asymmetrical priming effects. We offer the first data set where L2 proficiency and L1/L2 exposure/use are simultaneously investigated as continuous variables, along with word frequency. While we replicate the asymmetry in priming effects, our data provide useful insights into the factors driving L2–L1 priming. These fall almost exclusively under the category of stimulus-level factors, with L2 exposure/use being the only experiential variable to show considerable influence, although complex interactions involving L2 proficiency and word frequency are also present. We discuss the implications of these results for models of bilingual lexical processing and for the appropriate measurement of experiential factors in this type of research.

Highlights

The literature on multilingual lexical organization has been dominated by two different but interconnected debates
The second debate asked whether the lexical items of different languages are functionally independent of each other, or rather lexical selection is open to competition among potential candidates from several languages, irrespective of what the response-relevant language is in a given context
Together with the insight provided by regression analyses in the first two experiments, which showed that L2 proficiency modulated the effect size of L2–L1 priming, these results indicate that high proficiency is a crucial factor behind the disappearance of the priming asymmetry

Summary

Introduction

The literature on multilingual lexical organization has been dominated by two different but interconnected debates. Words with similar orthography and/or phonology but with different meanings across languages, interlingual homographs, have been exhaustively explored during the last decades Whether they yield facilitatory or inhibitory effects seems to be less clear, as this is dependent on factors such as the task employed or the stimulus list composition (e.g., Brenders, van Hell, & Dijkstra, 2011; Dijkstra et al, 1999). Cross-language activation has been shown in priming studies exploring bilingual processing of compounds (Ko, Wang, & Kim, 2011; Wang, 2010) and derivation (e.g., Dunabeitia, Dimitropoulou, Morris, & Diependaele, 2013) What this body of research suggests is that words from different languages are activated and available for selection during production and comprehension, even in situations where only one of the languages is required. The existence of priming effects between them suggests that translation equivalents, cognate or not, activate shared semantic representations (Xia & Andrews, 2015, p. 295), and, have the potential to activate each other

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