Revisiting the Revised Hierarchical Model: Evidence for concept mediation in backward translation

Abstract

A claim fundamental to the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) was that concepts did not mediate backward translation, based on their findings of a category interference effect in forward translation in relatively fluent bilinguals but no category effect in backward translation. This study hypothesized that there was a category facilitation effect in L2-to-concept, which counterbalanced the category interference effect in concept-to-L1, resulting in an overall L2-to-L1 null category effect.In a novel English word-pair semantic comparison task, participants were presented with a sequence of English word-pairs, and judged which word's real-world referent was bigger in size. Results found a significant category facilitation effect in both L2-to-concept for young Chinese adults and L1-to-concept for young English adults when increasing the number of trials. The findings help explain why Kroll and Stewart's finding of an overall L2-to-L1 null category effect cannot be evidence against concept mediation in backward translation.