L2 primes L1 – translation priming in LDT and semantic categorisation with unbalanced bilinguals

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe aim of the study was to test whether proficient L2 users living in an L1-dominant environment would exhibit significant L2–L1 translation priming in a lexical decision task (LDT) and in a sematic categorisation task (SCT). Only a few previous studies have found significant L2–L1 priming in LDT whereas significant results have often been recorded in SCT but only for exemplars. In the present study, significant L2–L1 priming has been found in both tasks. Furthermore, in SCT L2–L1 priming was significant not only for exemplars but also for non-exemplars. However, the effect was stronger for exemplars than for non-exemplars. Such a pattern of results is discussed with respect to current models of lexical representation and language processing in bilinguals.