Abstract
Research on the processing of translations offers important insights on how bilinguals negotiate the representation of words from two languages in one mind and one brain. Evidence so far has shown that translation equivalents effectively activate each other as well as their shared concept even when translations lack of any formal overlap (i.e., non-cognates) and even when one of them is presented subliminally, namely under masked priming conditions. In the lexical decision studies testing masked translation priming effects with unbalanced bilinguals a remarkably stable pattern emerges: larger effects in the dominant (L1) to the non-dominant (L2) translation direction, than vice versa. Interestingly, this asymmetry vanishes when simultaneous and balanced bilinguals are tested, suggesting that the linguistic profile of the bilinguals could be determining the pattern of cross-language lexico-semantic activation across the L2 learning trajectory. The present study aims to detect whether L2 proficiency is the critical variable rendering the otherwise asymmetric cross-language activation of translations obtained in the lexical decision task into symmetric. Non-cognate masked translation priming effects were examined with three groups of Greek (L1)–English (L2) unbalanced bilinguals, differing exclusively at their level of L2 proficiency. Although increased L2 proficiency led to improved overall L2 performance, masked translation priming effects were virtually identical across the three groups, yielding in all cases significant but asymmetric effects (i.e., larger effects in the L1 → L2 than in the L2 → L1 translation direction). These findings show that proficiency does not modulate masked translation priming effects at intermediate levels, and that a native-like level of L2 proficiency is needed for symmetric effects to emerge. They furthermore, pose important constraints on the operation of the mechanisms underlying the development of cross-language lexico-semantic links.
Highlights
The learning of a non-dominant second language (L2) by associating a newly learnt word to its translation equivalent in the dominant native language (L1) represents the most common L2 teaching strategy (e.g., Jiang and Forster, 2001; Kroll and Tokowicz, 2005; Comesaña et al, 2009)
The spoken part of the test was a brief interview during which each student was evaluated on his/her communication skills in English through their answers on a series of open questions. Based on these measures the British Council teaching team indicated that the most clear-cut proficiency distinction was found across the students who were in the process of undertaking one of the three available ESOL Examinations supervised by the University of Cambridge: the First Certificate in English (FCE), the Certificate of Advanced English (CAE), and the Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE)
We presented three non-cognate masked translation priming lexical decision experiments testing the pattern of effects obtained in the forward and the backward translation direction with three groups of Greek–English
Summary
The learning of a non-dominant second language (L2) by associating a newly learnt word to its translation equivalent in the dominant native language (L1) represents the most common L2 teaching strategy (e.g., Jiang and Forster, 2001; Kroll and Tokowicz, 2005; Comesaña et al, 2009). The gradual L2 acquisition leads to gradually enhanced autonomy of this language This progressive independence of the L2 could be reflected in the way L2 words are processed and represented in relationship to both their L1 translations and their corresponding conceptual representations. The current study reviews the existing evidence of automatic co-activation of translation equivalents gathered using the masked translation priming paradigm and empirically addresses the issue of whether the level of L2 proficiency affects masked translation priming effects This way, we aim at testing whether at different stages of the L2 acquisition process, when the representational status of the L2 with respect to the L1 differs, the patterns of automatic co-activation of translation equivalents vary
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