Is translation priming asymmetry due to partial awareness of the prime?

Abstract

A 50ms prime duration is often adopted in both L1-L2 and L2-L1 directions in the cross-language priming paradigm. It is unknown how aware bilinguals are of the briefly presented primes of different scripts; and whether the degree of awareness of L1 and L2 primes is at a similar level. Kouider and Dupoux's (2004) proposal of partial awareness suggests that 50ms English primes were sufficient to make a semantic interpretation. It is unclear whether this is the case when processing one's L2 or a different script. Experiment 1 was designed to measure the comparable prime durations for semantic interpretation of Chinese primes vs. English primes. Experiment 2 tested whether partial awareness of primes would cause priming asymmetry. Our findings demonstrate that a 50ms prime duration gave rise to different degrees of semantic activation in different scripts and L1/L2. However, increasing prime duration on L2 primes did not produce L2-L1 priming.