THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2015 Vol. 68, No. 2, 294–325, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2014.944195

Masked translation priming asymmetry in ChineseEnglish bilinguals: Making sense of the Sense Model Violet Xia and Sally Andrews School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Masked translation priming asymmetry is the robust finding that priming from a bilingual’s first language (L1) to their second language (L2) is stronger than priming from L2 to L1. This asymmetry has been claimed to be task dependent. The Sense Model proposed by Finkbeiner, Forster, Nicol, and Nakamura (2004) claims that the asymmetry is reduced in semantic categorization relative to lexical decision due to a category filtering mechanism that limits the features considered in categorization decisions to dominant, category-relevant features. This paper reports two pairs of semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks designed to test the Sense Model’s predictions. The experiments replicated the finding of Finkbeiner et al. that L2-L1 priming is somewhat stronger in semantic categorization than lexical decision, selectively for exemplars of the category. However, the direct comparison of L2-L1 and L1-L2 translation priming across tasks failed to confirm the Sense Model’s central prediction that translation priming asymmetry is significantly reduced in semantic categorization. The data therefore fail to support the category filtering account of translation priming asymmetry. Rather, they suggest that pre-activation of conceptual features of the target category provides feedback to lexical forms that compensates for the weak connections between the lexical and conceptual representations of L2 words. Keywords: Masked priming; Bilingual processing; Lexical decision; Semantic categorization.

The organization of a bilingual’s two languages has been a major focus of psycholinguistic research over the past few decades. Most of these studies have suggested that bilinguals have a conceptual store that is shared by both the dominant first language (L1) and the non-dominant second language (L2), but a separate lexical store is maintained for each language (e.g., De Groot, 1993; Kroll & Stewart, 1994; Potter, So, Von Eckardt, & Feldman, 1984). However, debate continues about how the lexical representations of a bilingual’s two languages interact with each other and with the shared conceptual representation (e.g., Brysbaert & Duyck, 2010; Kroll, Van Hell, Tokowicz, & Green, 2010).

The masked translation priming paradigm, based on the monolingual masked priming task developed by Forster & Davis (1984), has been a major source of evidence about the representational status of translation pairs and the extent to which their conceptual overlap supports automatic activation of translation equivalents. In a standard masked priming paradigm, a prime is presented briefly (about 50 ms) in lowercase letters following a forward mask, usually presented for 500 ms, and immediately followed by a target word presented for at least 500 ms in uppercase letters. In the translation priming version, the prime and the target are in different languages: they are either translation

Correspondence should be addressed to Sally Andrews, School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail: [email protected] This research formed part of the first author’s PhD dissertation completed at the University of Sydney.

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equivalents, like femme in French and woman in English, or completely unrelated, like ville and woman. Under masked conditions, most subjects are unaware of the prime and hence are unable to use it strategically to respond to the target. Nevertheless, masked primes have been shown to exert a robust influence on target processing reflected by significant facilitation of responses to targets preceded by related relative to unrelated primes (see Kinoshita & Lupker, 2003, for a review). Many implementations of the masked translation priming paradigm have interpolated an additional mask (e.g., Finkbeiner, Forster, Nicol, & Nakamura, 2004; Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998; Jiang, 1999) for 50–150 ms between the prime and the target (Jiang, 1999) to increase the time available for prime processing, while ensuring that the prime remains unavailable to conscious awareness.

MASKED TRANSLATION PRIMING ASYMMETRY Numerous studies have reported masked translation priming effects using a lexical decision task: decision time to a target word is facilitated by a preceding translation equivalent prime relative to an unrelated prime. This effect implies that the lexical representation of the prime word automatically activates its translation equivalent and hence facilitates recognition of the target word (Neely, 1991). Cognate translations, which have similar lexical forms (e.g., cat in English and its French translation chat), yield consistently larger masked translation priming effects than noncognate translations (e.g., apple and pomme) (e.g., Davis et al., 2010; De Groot & Nas, 1991; Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2010; Gollan, Forster, & Frost, 1997; Kim & Davis, 2003; Voga & Grainger, 2007). The cognate advantage implies that masked translation priming effects may, in part, arise from orthographic and/or phonological overlap between translation pairs. To rule out the potential influence of sublexical overlap and focus on lexico-semantic representations, recent translation priming studies have focused on noncognate

translations, which have different entries at the lexical level but map to the same conceptual representation (Smith, 1991). The presence of priming effects for noncognate translations implies that translation equivalents activate shared representations at the semantic level. Particularly strong evidence is provided by findings of translation priming between languages with different scripts, such as Hebrew and English (e.g., Gollan et al., 1997), and Chinese and English (e.g., Jiang & Forster, 2001) which preclude any possibility of sublexical mediation. An important feature of masked translation priming is that, in lexical decision tasks, masked primes in L1 facilitate decision times to word targets in L2, but not vice versa. Numerous translation priming studies have found robust evidence for this “masked translation priming asymmetry”. Table 1 summarizes the published lexical decision studies testing masked translation priming using noncognate items. All studies that have included the L1-L2 condition have reported significant priming, and all but one (Basnight-Brown & Altarriba, 2007) showed translation priming asymmetry—significantly stronger for L1-L2 than L2L1 priming. However, the reliability of L2-L1 priming varies across these studies. Only two of the nine published papers reported significant L2L1 priming (Basnight-Brown & Altarriba, 2007; Schoonbaert, Duyck, Brysbaert, & Hartsuiker, 2009); one reported mixed evidence (Jiang, 1999, significant L2-L1 priming effect in one of the five lexical decision experiments); and five reported null effects (Dimitropoulou, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2011; Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Gollan et al., 1997; Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998; Jiang & Forster, 2001). The basis of this variability is not clear. Seven of the thirteen experiments showing null L2-L1 priming effects included a backward mask but that does not seem to be a systematic factor: two experiments using backward masks showed significant effects (Schoonbaert et al., 2009, Experiments 1 & 2), and six that did not include backward masks showed null effects (Dimitropoulou et al., 2011; Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Gollan et al., 1997; Grainger & FrenckMestre, 1998; Jiang, 1999; Jiang & Forster, 2001).

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296 Table 1. Summary of published lexical decision studies testing masked translation priming for noncognate target words THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2015, 68 (2)

Priming Effect (ms) Study De Groot and Nas (1991) Experiment 3 Experiment 4 Basnight-Brown and Altarriba (2007) Experiment 2 Dimitropoulou et al. (2011) Experiment 1 Experiment 3 Finkbeiner et al. (2004) Experiment 2 Gollan et al. (1997) Experiments 1 & 3 Experiments 2 & 4 Grainger and French-Mestre (1998)

Jiang (1999) Experiment 1 Experiment 2 Experiment 3 Experiment 4 Experiment 5 Jiang & Forster (2001) Experiment 1 Experiments 3 & 4 Schoonbaert et al. (2009) Experiments 1 & 2 Experiments 1 & 2 Note: *p , .05; **p , .001.

Language Dominance

L2 AOA

Prime

Blank

Backward Mask

Dutch-English Dutch-English

– –

– –

40 40

20 20

– –

Spanish-English

L2 dominant

early

native like

100



Greek-Spanish Greek-Spanish

L1 dominant L1 dominant

late late

low low

50 50

Japanese-English

L1 dominant

late

high

Hebrew-English Hebrew-English

L1 dominant L2 dominant

late late

English-French English-French

L1 dominant L1 dominant

– –

Chinese-English Chinese-English Chinese-English Chinese-English Chinese-English

L1 dominant L1 dominant L1 dominant L1 dominant L1 dominant

Chinese-English Chinese-English Dutch-English Dutch-English

Languages

L2 Proficiency

L2-L1

Pattern

35* 40*

– –

– –



33*

24*

symm.

– –

– 50

29* 31*

−5 −6

asymm. asymm.

50



150



−4



high high

50 50

– –

– –

36* 52*

9 −4

asymm. asymm.

very high very high

29 43

– –

14 14

– –

2 10

– –

late late late late late

high high high high high

50 50 50 50 50

– – 50 50 50

– – – 150 150

45* 68* – – –

13* 3 4 7 −2

asymm. asymm. – – –

L1 dominant L1 dominant

late late

high high

50 50

50 –

150 –

– 41*

8 4

– asymm.

L1 dominant L1 dominant

late late

high high

50 50

50 –

150 50

100** 19**

28* 12*

asymm. asymm.

good good

L1-L2

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The samples vary in proficiency but that also does not appear to play a systematic role. All of the significant L2-L1 priming effects were found in high proficiency groups, but null effects were also observed in both high and low proficiency groups (Dimitropoulou et al., 2011; Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Gollan et al., 1997; Grainger & FrenckMestre, 1998; Jiang, 1999; Jiang & Forster, 2001). While the factors that determine the reliability of L2-L1 priming remain unclear, the available evidence clearly confirms that masked translation priming effects in the lexical decision task are stronger from L1 to L2 than from L2 to L1. This asymmetry has been interpreted as evidence that an L2 prime does not activate its semantic representation to the same extent as an L1 prime. However, this conclusion is qualified by research suggesting that weak L2-L1 priming is specific to the lexical decision task. Two studies reported significant masked translation priming effects in the L2-L1 direction for noncognate translations in a semantic categorization task while the same stimuli and bilingual population produced null effects in a lexical decision task (Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998). This evidence has been claimed to show that, in contrast to the asymmetrical translation priming consistently observed in lexical decision tasks, “in semantic categorisation … priming is symmetrical” (Finkbeiner et al., 2004, p. 1). A possible explanation of the task difference, proposed by Grainger and Frenck-Mestre (1998), is that semantic categorization requires access to semantic information whereas lexical decision does not. However, this account cannot explain why strong forward translation priming is consistently observed for noncognates in lexical decision. Nor can it explain Wang and Forster’s (2010) recent evidence that, in contrast to the significant 20 ms L2-L1 priming effect observed for Chinese-English translations in a semantic categorization task using clearly defined, pre-existing categories (e.g., colours, part of a building, a family relative), minimal L2-L1 priming effect occurred (−3 ms) in an ad hoc categorization task (Is the physical object larger than a brick?), although the same stimuli showed significant priming

(34 ms) in the L1-L2 direction. Wang and Forster also showed that the L2-L1 priming obtained for clearly defined categories only occurred for items that were exemplars of the category being tested in that block; “no” responses to non-exemplars showed no L2-L1 priming (−2 ms). They argued that this evidence shows that the presence of L2-L1 priming effect in the semantic categorization task is “not obtained merely because the task required semantic interpretation” (Wang and Forster, 2010, p. 327). Like nonword interference effects in semantic categorization task for monolingual participants (i.e., false alarms to neighbours like turple in an animal categorization task, Forster, 2006; Forster & Hector, 2002), L2L1 translation priming in semantic categorization appears to be restricted to members of a clearly defined, pre-activated category (Wang & Forster, 2010).

THEORETICAL ACCOUNTS OF TRANSLATION PRIMING ASYMMETRY The revised hierarchical model’s account A seminal model of bilingual memory, the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM; Kroll & Stewart, 1994), was explicitly developed to explain asymmetries in translation performance by late and L1dominant bilinguals (Kroll et al., 2010). The model proposes independent lexical representations in each language but a shared conceptual system. According to the model, when a person acquires an L2, strong links have already been established between L1 word forms and concepts. L2 words are attached to the system by lexical links to their L1 translation equivalents, so that access to the meaning of L2 words is mediated by L1. As L2 proficiency increases, direct conceptual links between L2 word forms and concepts are established and gradually strengthened, and the lexical links to L1 translation equivalents become correspondingly weaker. The dynamic relationship between the lexical and conceptual links in the RHM was proposed

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to explain the asymmetry observed in translation production: both early and late bilinguals can translate faster from L2 to L1 than from L1 to L2 (e.g., Kroll & Stewart, 1994; Sholl, Sankaranarayanan, & Kroll, 1995). According to the model, this is because translation from L2 to L1 is accomplished through direct lexical links, while L1 to L2 translation necessarily relies on slower, conceptually mediated links because there are no direct links between L1 and L2 word forms. Although the RHM was only originally applied to translation production (Kroll et al., 2010), it appears to predict the same form of asymmetry in masked translation priming. At least for less proficient bilinguals, stronger priming in the L2-L1 direction would be expected in a cross-language priming experiment due to the strong lexical links from L2 to L1. This prediction is clearly contradicted by the empirical evidence reviewed above, showing that unbalanced bilinguals produce robust priming effects from L1 to L2 in a lexical decision task but little, if any, priming from L2 to L1 (e.g., Dimitropoulou et al., 2011; Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998; Jiang & Forster, 2001; Sanchez-Casas, Davis, & Garcia-Albea, 1992). A potential solution within the RHM is to assume that translation priming effects as measured by the lexical decision task, particularly across languages that do not share a script, depend on conceptual mediation rather than lexical links, perhaps because lexical links are difficult to establish for scripts that do not share sublexical constituents. The model would then predict a strong priming effect from L1 to L2 but weak or no priming effect from L2 to L1 because the conceptual links between L1 words and concepts are stronger than those between L2 words and concepts. To be specific, L1 primes L2 because the L1 prime activates a shared conceptual node, which then pre-activates the lexical form of the L2 translation equivalent, and supports effective L1-L2 priming. However, L2 does not reliably prime L1 because the L2 prime is only weakly connected to the common conceptual representation and therefore does not yield the automatic conceptual activation required to pre-activate the L1

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translation equivalent lexical form, and so produces weak or no priming in the L2-L1 direction. Attributing L2-L1 translation priming to the conceptual pathway of the RHM framework assumes that L2 primes can, in principle, be processed semantically, even by less proficient bilinguals. Evidence for conceptual mediation in L2L1 translation was reported by Sunderman and Kroll (2006) in a translation verification task. They observed that low proficiency EnglishSpanish bilinguals took longer to reject semantically related words (e.g., cama-blanket) than unrelated words (e.g., cama-scholar), implicating semantic access during L2 word processing (Brysbaert & Duyck, 2010). Similar semantic interference effects were found in novice learners in translation recognition tasks (Altarriba & Mathis, 1997; Finkbeiner & Nicol, 2003). These findings suggest that direct access to the conceptual system from L2 words can be achieved even at early stages of L2 acquisition. The RHM model’s predictions about the impact of level of proficiency in each language on masked noncognate translation priming effects are also supported by evidence showing that the robust asymmetrical translation priming in a lexical decision task seen in unbalanced bilinguals with a moderate or high proficiency in L2 (Dimitropoulou et al., 2011; Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Gollan et al., 1997; Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998; Jiang, 1999; Jiang & Forster, 2001) disappears in balanced bilinguals who learned two languages simultaneously since birth and thus are equally proficient in both of them (Basnight-Brown & Altarriba, 2007; Duñabeitia et al., 2010; Duyck, 2005; Perea, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2008). Only one study has reported symmetrical masked translation priming in low proficiency bilinguals in a lexical decision task (Duyck & Warlop, 2009). However, this unexpected symmetry was questioned because of low statistical power and was not replicated in a masked translation priming study using a similar low proficiency bilingual sample (Dimitropoulou et al., 2011). Although the RHM can potentially account for much of the evidence on translation priming asymmetry, it cannot explain why the magnitude of the asymmetry should differ between semantic

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categorization and lexical decision tasks. Since semantic categorization clearly requires the lexical representation of the L1 target to be activated through conceptual links from L2 to L1, it should yield the same effects as lexical decision, that is, minimal L2-L1 priming.

The Sense Model’s account More recently, Finkbeiner et al. (2004) proposed the Sense Model to explain the task difference in translation priming asymmetry. The Sense Model can be taken as an extension of De Groot’s distributed conceptual feature model (DCFM; De Groot, 1992a, 1993). In contrast to the localist assumption of the RHM, which represents a word’s meaning as a single memory unit, the DCFM assumes distributed representations, in which the meaning of an individual word consists of a pattern of activation across a set of conceptual features representing meaning elements of the words in a bilingual’s two languages. A central assumption of the DCFM is that words vary in the degree to which their semantic representations are shared across languages. Concrete words are more likely than abstract words to share a number of conceptual features between languages and cognate translation pairs tend to have a higher proportion of overlapping feature than noncognates. In a series of studies, De Groot and her colleagues (De Groot, 1992a, 1992b, 1995; De Groot, Dannenburg, & Van Hell, 1994; Van Hell, 1998; Van Hell & De Groot, 1998) provided evidence that concrete words and cognate translation pairs rely on shared conceptual features, whereas abstract words and noncognate translation pairs show languagespecific effects across a range of tasks, including translation production, translation recognition, lexical decision, and word association. Although the DCFM does an excellent job of accommodating a range of word level data (Heredia, 2008; Kroll & Tokowicz, 2005) it fails to explain the asymmetries in cross-language priming summarized above because it assumes equal connection strengths for L1 and L2 words regardless of language direction (Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Heredia, 2008).

The Sense Model (Finkbeiner et al., 2004) extended the representational assumptions of the DCFM to account for differences in bilinguals’ knowledge of words in each language. The Sense Model assumes that most words have multiple meanings/senses. An L2 speaker would likely know fewer senses of an L2 word than an L1 word since they are less proficient in L2 than L1. This leads to a representational asymmetry between L1 and L2 words at the semantic level, such that most, if not all, of the L2 senses are shared with L1, but not vice versa. Following from that, the Sense Model assumes that translation priming depends crucially on the proportion of shared to unshared senses between the prime and the target. To be specific, a noncognate prime can only activate its translation equivalent target through shared semantic senses so priming will only occur when the proportion of shared to unshared prime-target senses is high. Thus, priming occurs from L1 to L2 because an L1 prime activates a high proportion of L2 target senses. However, priming from L2 to L1 is weak or non-existent because an L2 prime activates only the dominant senses of an L1 target, which is usually too low a proportion of its conceptual features to activate the L1 word form. The Sense Model attributes the task difference in masked L2-L1 translation priming to a “category filtering” effect. It proposes that L2-L1 translation priming occurs for exemplars in semantic categorization because the category cue acts as a filter which limits activation to just the category-relevant senses of exemplars, so that only these senses influence the decision. Because category features are typically dominant and therefore familiar to L2 readers, this category filtering mechanism potentially equates the proportion of primed to unprimed target senses for L1 and L2 targets, leading to equivalent priming in both directions. A further implication of this account is that L2L1 priming should only be observed for words that are exemplars of the category that participants must make decisions about because non-exemplars do not benefit from category filtering, and the proportion of primed to unprimed target senses therefore remains too low to yield priming for

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non-exemplars (Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Wang & Forster, 2010). Semantic categorization for nonexemplars is therefore equivalent to lexical decision, where there is no category context. Consequently, non-exemplars should behave in a semantic categorization task just like all word targets do in a lexical decision task—they should yield strong priming from L1 to L2 and weak or no priming from L2 to L1. Thus, the Sense Model provides an apparently plausible account of masked translation priming asymmetry, including its sensitivity to task demands. However, the empirical evidence supporting the model’s predictions has so far been relatively limited. Finkbeiner et al. (2004) and Wang and Forster (2010) obtained significant masked L2-L1 translation priming effects in semantic categorization with unbalanced Japanese-English and Chinese-English bilinguals respectively. However, these bilingual experiments examined masked translation priming only in the L2-L1 direction. Neither of them directly compared translation priming effects in both L2-L1 and L1-L2 directions as is required to establish whether the relative symmetry of priming across languages differs between the two tasks. Although Wang and Forster (2010) confirmed that unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals showed significant L2-L1 priming in tasks requiring categorization of clear, pre-defined semantic categories, they did not assess lexical decision performance for the same participants and items to validate the Sense Model’s prediction that it shows significantly greater translation priming asymmetry than semantic categorization. The data that Finkbeiner et al. (2004) provided to support their claim that priming asymmetry is eliminated in a semantic categorization task relative to lexical decision relied on monolingual participants. They compared priming in native English speakers for “many sense” words in English (e.g., head), which were claimed to parallel L1 words, with that for “few sense” words in English (e.g., skull), which were assumed to be equivalent to L2 words. Generalizing from such monolingual data to L1 and L2 words in unbalanced bilinguals is clearly questionable.

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THE PRESENT STUDY The present research was designed to directly test the predictions of the Sense Model by systematically comparing L1-L2 and L2-L1 priming in semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks. Finkbeiner et al. (2004) initially proposed that “translation priming asymmetry is eliminated in semantic categorisation relative to lexical decision” (p. 16) so that translation priming is “symmetrical in a semantic categorisation task” (p. 13). However, this strong claim may overestimate the impact of category filtering. Even if the semantic categorization task limits activation to categoryrelevant features, as the Sense Model proposes, these features may still be richer for L1 than L2, particularly for more proficient bilinguals (Wang, 2013). This more graded view predicts reduced asymmetry in semantic categorization tasks relative to lexical decision tasks, rather than fully symmetrical priming in both forward and backward directions. To assess this prediction, we conducted two pairs of experiments, with different samples of unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals, that each directly compared L2-L1 priming with L1-L2 priming for the same stimuli and participants in semantic categorization (Experiments 1A and 2A) and lexical decision tasks (Experiments 1B and 2B). The experiments also tested withinlanguage priming for both Chinese (L1) and English (L2) to provide a baseline against which to evaluate the cross-language priming effects. Including identity and translation primes in the same list also reduces potential bias towards one of the participants’ languages as well as contributing to distinguishing between language-related and language-independent processes (Altarriba & Basnight-Brown, 2007; Dimitropoulou et al., 2011).

EXPERIMENT 1A Experiment 1A was modelled on the blocked semantic categorization procedure used by Finkbeiner et al. (2004) and many other researchers

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(Bueno & Frenck-Mestre, 2002; Forster & Hector, 2002; Forster, Mohan, & Hector, 2003; FrenckMestre & Bueno, 1999; Grainger & FrenckMestre, 1998), in which participants complete a series of blocks of 10 to 20 items that each require the same category decision, and shift category between blocks. Such category blocking appears to be necessary to observe robust L2-L1 translation priming (e.g., Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998; Wang & Forster, 2010): using a semantic categorization task in which categories changed on successive trials, Sanchez-Casas et al. (1992) found significant L2-L1 priming for cognates, but not for noncognates.

Method Participants The 37 Chinese-English bilingual participants, who were recruited from Sydney University campus community and paid for their participation in the experiment, completed both the semantic categorization task of Experiment 1A and the lexical decision task of Experiment 1B, in counterbalanced order, within a single experimental session, separated by filler tasks. The participants were all native speakers of Chinese who reported themselves to be fluent in both spoken and written English and Mandarin Chinese. Online questionnaires were used to screen participants. Demographics and language history information were collected from a revised version of Dunn and Tree’s (2009) Bilingual Dominance Scale questionnaire which contains questions about age of first exposure and duration of L2 learning, self-assessed language proficiency, language environment and linguistic habits. On average, the participants started to learn English at 10 and had learned English for 9 years and Chinese for 12 years during their schooling in China. To be admitted to Sydney University they had been required to achieve a score of at least six on a nine-band scale in the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) used to assess international applicants. At the time of testing, all had been living in Australia for at least

one year (average time = 3 years). The average self-assessments of language proficiency in each language, summarized in Table 2, confirmed that the sample consisted of L1-dominant bilinguals who rated their Chinese language skills as significantly higher than their skills in English, t(36) = 9.09, p , .001. However, there was no significant difference between the mean percentage use estimates in each language (p . .1), demonstrating that both languages were used relatively equally despite living in an L2 environment. To provide a more objective measure of proficiency that could be used to statistically control for individual differences, participants were also administered Chinese and English language proficiency tests (based on the Chinese Horizon Placement test and the Cambridge ESOL Exam respectively) assessing aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension in each language. Standardized scores on these tests, which were not correlated between Chinese and English (r = .04), were used as covariates in the analyses. Materials An initial list of 160 English words was selected from ten categories according to two category norms (Battig & Montague, 1969; De Deyne et al., 2008). In order to ensure translation equivalence for each English-Chinese word pair, the first author (a native speaker of Chinese) used three well-known, online, two-way translation dictionaries (i.e., ICIBA, NCIKU, GOOGLE TRANSLATE) to translate these items in both directions between English and Chinese. Only those word pairs that were translated identically in each direction by all dictionaries, and for which the Chinese translation was a two-character compound Chinese word, were selected. A total of 100 word pairs met these criteria. These items were all concrete nouns belonging to six semantic categories (MAMMAL, BIRD, FRUIT, VEGETABLE, CLOTHING, PART OF THE HUMAN BODY). Ultimately, 64 pairs were selected as exemplars, with 8 to 12 items from each category, and a further 36 pairs were used as practice items, 6 per category. The words were of

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Table 2. Mean and standard deviation (in parentheses) of self-rating proficiency scores, averaged over reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and mean percentage use of each language reported by the participants tested in Experiments 1 & 2 Experiment 1 (N = 37)

Experiment 2 (N = 32)

Measure

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

Average language skills Usage (%)

6.5 (0.8) 53 (2.1)

4.9 (1.1) 47 (2.8)

6.7 (0.6) 55 (2.5)

5.2 (1.2) 45 (2.6)

Note: Likert scale: 1 = very poor … 7 = native like.

low-to-moderate frequency, averaging 10 and 16 per million occurrences in Chinese and English, respectively. The Chinese word frequency was based on the Corpus of Modern Chinese Studies (Sun, Huang, Sun, Li, & Xing, 1997), an online corpus of Chinese individual and compound words, and the English word frequency estimates were obtained from the CELEX database (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995). An additional 100 English-Chinese translation word pairs were selected to serve as control primes for exemplar/non-exemplar trials, as well as for practice trials. These words were unrelated to their targets, but were matched with the critical primes in both languages for frequency, wordlength or stroke count for English and Chinese, respectively, as well as concreteness and imageability extracted from the MRC database (Coltheart, 1981). A repeated measures ANOVA conducted on each matching variable showed that they did not differ between conditions (all Fs , 2, ps . .1). The ultimate test materials consisted of 4 counterbalanced lists of 128 prime-target stimuli, organized into 6 blocks of 8 to 12 items per category, with half exemplar pairs and half non-exemplar pairs in each block. Exemplars in one category were used as non-exemplars in another category but in each category block, non-exemplars shared no semantic attributes with exemplars. Each target appeared twice for each participant, once as

an exemplar and once as a non-exemplar.1 The targets were blocked by semantic category. The order of categories and of the items within each category was individually randomized for each participant. Typicality rating A typicality rating task using a 7-point rating scale assessed bilingual participants’ judgement of how good an exemplar each item was of the category. This task was also used to assess participants’ familiarity with the target words by telling them to mark any word for which they did not know the meaning. The rating data were collected from two groups of participants. The Chinese-English bilinguals (N = 37) who participated in the experiment rated both Chinese and English words after completing the experimental tasks, and a separate group of Chinese monolinguals (N = 28), tested in China, rated the Chinese stimuli after completing a baseline experiment. The average typicality of all items across groups was 5.61 on the 7-point rating scale, indicating that all the items were judged to be typical exemplars for a particular category. The rating results in the English version showed that the bilingual participants knew most of the English items (96%). ANOVA analysis showed no significant differences between bilinguals’ overall rating for Chinese and English translations (F , 1, p . .1), and no

1 The same target items were repeated across exemplar and non-exemplar conditions of Experiment 1A, as well as across languages. Thus, across the entire experimental session, each target concept was presented six times—three times in each language. Although this design risks possible carryover effects and dilution of priming effects due to stimulus repetition (Zeelenberg & Pecher, 2003), these were minimized through counterbalancing of task and language order, and list assignment, none of which yielded significant effects in the analyses. Given the relatively limited number of suitable stimuli and the difficulty in matching across languages, this design was chosen to maximize control over item attributes by comparing the same target items across all conditions.

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Table 3. Design and sample stimuli for the MAMMAL category block in the semantic categorization task of Experiment 1A Exemplars

Non-exemplars

Prime Language condition Repetition L1-L1 L2-L2 Translation L1-L2 L2-L1

Prime

Related

Unrelated

Target

Related

Unrelated

狐狸 fox

部落 tribe

狐狸 FOX

菠菜 spinach

汽油 petrol

菠菜 SPINACH

狐狸 fox

部落 tribe

FOX 狐狸

菠菜 spinach

汽油 petrol

SPINACH 菠菜

significant differences in the overall rating scores between the bilingual data and the monolingual data for the Chinese words (F , 1, p . .1). Design and procedure As shown in Table 3, Experiment 1A manipulated four independent variables with two levels for each, namely target type (exemplar/non-exemplar), prime language (Chinese/English), target language (Chinese/English), and prime type (related/ unrelated). Following the procedure used by Finkbeiner et al. (2004) and many other researchers (Bueno & Frenck-Mestre, 2002; Forster et al., 2003; Forster & Hector, 2002; Frenck-Mestre & Bueno, 1999; Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998), items were blocked according to semantic category. In each block, participants were presented with a category label and required to make a binary classification of the subsequent sequence of 8 to 12 items according to whether or not they were members of that category. Each block contained an equal number of exemplars and non-exemplars of the category and the first 6 items, in each block, were practice items, which were excluded from data analysis, to reduce any effects of category switching. Participants completed two lists of items, in counterbalanced order. Each list contained targets from a single target language, Chinese or English, with mixed prime languages. Chinese targets were presented in simplified Chinese characters of size 18 in bold SimSun font. Chinese primes were in the

Target

same font but of size 16 and not bold. English stimuli were presented in different cases, with all targets in upper case and all primes in lower case. Each trial was presented in the following sequence (modelled on Finkbeiner et al., 2004): the trial started with a 500 ms forward mask (########), followed by a prime for 50 ms, followed by a backward mask (&&&&&&&&) for 150 ms, and then the target word, which stayed on-screen until participants responded or a maximum of 2000 ms elapsed. The backward mask was included to ensure that participants have sufficient time to process the unfamiliar L2 primes (cf. Jiang, 1999). To prevent the visibility of the prime due to identical forward and backward masks, different symbols were used for each mask type. Participants were not told about the presence of primes and no participant reported being aware of their existence. To reduce any confusion due to switching target language and category, the category label was presented in the language of target words in that list, and remained at the upper centre of the screen above the targets throughout all trials in a category, and changed as the category switched. Participants decided whether the targets belonged to the indicated category or not by pressing either a YES button (with their dominant hand) or a NO button as quickly as possible. Each experimental list lasted about 8 minutes. Stimulus presentation and response recording was controlled by the DMDX system (Forster & Forster, 2003).

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The two semantic categorization lists were completed within a testing session of about 90 minutes, which also included the two lexical decision lists of Experiment 2B, and the demographic questionnaires, language proficiency tests, and stimulus validation tasks described earlier. The questionnaires and proficiency tests were interleaved between the experimental tasks to ensure a filled interval of at least 10 minutes between each of the four experimental lists in order to reduce the impact of target repetition and changes of target language.

Results and discussion Mean reaction times (RTs) for correct responses and percentage error rates (ERs) were analysed by a repeated measures ANOVA, assessing the effects of target type (exemplar/non-exemplar), prime language (Chinese/English), target language (Chinese/English), and prime type (related/unrelated). Separate analyses were conducted treating subjects and items as random effects, reported as F1 and F2 respectively. List (four levels) was also included as a between-subjects factor in both subject- and item-wise analyses to remove variance due to the counterbalancing procedure. The same trimming procedure was employed for all experiments. Any RTs more than 3 standard deviations above or below the mean RT for each participant were excluded as outliers, which affected 1.5% of all the responses in this experiment. One participant was excluded from all analyses because her high ER (30%) exceeded the 25% error criterion. A total of 9 items were removed from all conditions due to excess error rates (≥ 50%) in the English condition. Throughout the paper, all significant effects had p values less than the .05 level, unless noted otherwise. Four-way ANOVA analyses showed that the main effect of target type was significant, F1 (1, 32) = 13.61, p , .05; F2 (1, 212) = 14.11, p , .001, reflecting faster average classification of exemplars than non-exemplars. There were also highly significant main effects of both target language, F1 (1, 32) = 43.79, p , .001; F2 (1, 212) = 524.71, p , .001, and prime language, F1 (1, 32) = 46.27, p , .001; F2 (1, 212) = 37.93,

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p , .001, because classification time was substantially faster for Chinese than English targets, and faster on average for words preceded by Chinese than English primes. The main effect of prime type was also highly significant, F1 (1, 32) = 78.11, p , .001; F2 (1, 212) = 88.88, p , .001, reflecting faster classification following related primes. Prime type interacted with target type, F1 (1, 32) = 12.81, p , .05; F2 (1, 212) = 13.06, p , .001, indicating that exemplar targets yielded significantly stronger average priming than nonexemplar targets. Prime type also interacted with prime language, F1 (1, 32) = 28.16, p , .001; F2 (1, 212) = 19.41, p , .001, because the average priming effect was larger for targets primed by Chinese words than English words. To decompose the significant interactions between target type, prime type and prime language and test the Sense Model’s prediction of symmetrical masked translation priming for exemplars but not for non-exemplars in semantic categorization, separate analyses were conducted on the data for exemplars and non-exemplars. The left section of Table 4 presents the results for exemplars. Repetition priming effect was significant in both the L1-L1 condition, F1 (1, 32) = 60.45, p , .001; F2 (1, 54) = 22.38, p , .001. and the L2-L2 condition, F1 (1, 32) = 8.57, p , .001; F2 (1, 54) = 9.90, p , .05. There was no significant difference in the magnitude of repetition priming as a function of target language (all Fs , 2.2, ps . .1), suggesting no masked priming asymmetry. Separate comparisons of RT for each translation priming direction showed that the L1-L2 priming effect was highly significant in both by-subject and by-item analyses, F1 (1, 32) = 30.95, p , .001; F2 (1, 54) = 55.47, p , .001, while the L2-L1 priming effect was significant by subjects, F1 (1, 32) = 6.2, p , .05, but only marginally significant by items, F2 (1, 54) = 3.38, p = .07. Critically, there was a significant difference (88 ms) between the amount of translation priming obtained in the L1-L2 and the L2-L1 directions, F1 (1, 32) = 14.11, p , .05; F2 (1, 54) = 30.79, p , .001, demonstrating asymmetrical translation priming.

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Table 4. Mean RT (ms), standard errors (in parentheses), percentage error rates, and RT priming effects for within-language and betweenlanguage conditions for the exemplar and non-exemplar targets from the semantic categorization task of Experiment 1A Exemplars Related Language condition Repetition L1-L1 L2-L2 Translation L1-L2 L2-L1

Non-exemplars

Unrelated

Related

Unrelated

RT (SE)

ER

RT (SE)

ER

Priming

RT (SE)

ER

RT (SE)

ER

Priming

522 (16) 691 (25)

5,1 15,1

588 (17) 733 (28)

11,9 15,6

66** 42*

530 (16) 775 (32)

2,7 9,8

568 (21) 785 (33)

2,8 13,1

38* 9

636 (25) 556 (15)

7,4 7,3

745 (29) 577 (16)

22,2 9,3

109** 21*

688 (30) 579 (15)

6,5 4,1

755 (31) 587 (16)

10,8 3,4

67* 8

Note: *p , .05; **p , .001.

Thus, the current experiment replicated the previous findings (Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998; Wang & Forster, 2010) of significant masked L2-L1 translation priming in semantic categorization, although this effect was not robust over items. However, by comparing the priming effects in both translation directions, the current results provided clear evidence of strong translation priming asymmetry. The significant repetition priming for L1 and L2 exemplars suggested that both the L1 and L2 masked primes were processed quickly enough to facilitate classification of the identity targets. Parallel analyses were conducted on the data for non-exemplars, presented in the right section of Table 4. Repetition priming effect for non-exemplars was significant in the L1-L1 condition, F1 (1, 32) = 12.62, p , .05; F2 (1, 54) = 16, p , .001; but not in the L2-L2 condition (all Fs , 1, ps . .1). However, like exemplars, the difference in the magnitude of within-language repetition effects (29 ms) was not significant for non-exemplars (all Fs , 2, ps . .1). Translation priming effect was significant in the L1-L2 direction, F1 (1, 32) = 21.77, p , .001; F2 (1, 54) = 10.85, p , .05, but not in the L2-L1 direction (all Fs , 2, ps . .1). The effect was significantly larger (59 ms) in the L1-L2 direction than the L2-L1 direction, F1 (1, 32) = 8.33, p , .05; F2 (1, 54) = 8.17, p , .05, confirming that nonexemplars also show masked translation priming asymmetry.

The Sense Model predicts that non-exemplars do not benefit from category filtering and thus should behave like word targets in lexical decision and show minimal L2-L1 priming and stronger asymmetry than exemplars. The predicted reduction in L2-L1 priming was confirmed but translation priming asymmetry for non-exemplars (59 ms) was numerically smaller, rather than larger, than that for exemplars (88 ms), although the difference was not significant (all Fs , 2, ps . .1). The mean ER for the complete sample was 9%, with 11% errors for exemplars and 7% errors for non-exemplars. The pattern of error data completely paralleled the RT data so accuracy results are not reported further. ANCOVA analyses assessed whether proficiency scores and the item covariates of typicality and frequency modulated the effects. None of the patterns of the effects reported changed significantly with any of these covariates (all Fs , 2, ps . .1). The findings of Experiment 1A confirm that the masked translation priming effect in the L2-L1 direction occurred only for category exemplars, and not for non-exemplars, in a semantic categorization task, as predicted by the Sense Model. The absence of L2-L1 priming for non-exemplars is consistent with the Sense Model and the finding of translation priming asymmetry for non-exemplars supports the Sense Model’s prediction that non-exemplars in a semantic categorization task

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should show the same asymmetrical pattern of translation priming as in a lexical decision task. However, the asymmetry for non-exemplars was not significantly smaller than that for exemplars, contradicting the Sense Model’s prediction of reduced asymmetry for exemplars.

EXPERIMENT 1B Experiment 1B used a lexical decision task with the same set of critical stimuli and the same group of bilingual participants to assess the Sense Model’s prediction that this task yields stronger translation priming asymmetry than the semantic categorization task.

Method Materials The same set of critical items from Experiment 1A were used as word targets, paired with equal numbers of nonword targets. English nonwords were all pronounceable and highly word-like, e.g., DACK. Chinese nonwords were also word-like. Each Chinese nonword was made up of two existing characters that were recombined into illegal combinations. One of the characters of each nonword was related to an experimentally relevant category (e.g., 岩虎, meaning “rocktiger”) to preclude potential reliance on the category-related characters to make a response, and to stimulate deep lexical processing. Nonword targets were preceded by unrelated word primes. Four stimulus lists of 128 items, 64 word and 64 nonword targets were created, which counterbalanced the assignment of word targets to priming conditions so that each word target appeared once in each language, but across lists each target word was primed by both related and unrelated repetition and translation primes. Design and procedure The design was identical to that of Experiment 1A except that in this task the targets were words and

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nonwords and the distinction between exemplars and non-exemplars was irrelevant. The general presentation procedure for each trial was the same as in semantic categorization but the items were presented in a single, individually randomized sequence instead of being blocked by semantic categories. Participants were required to decide whether the targets were real words or nonsense words by pressing either a YES button or a NO button.

Results and discussion The trimming procedure excluded 2.6% of all responses as outliers. Three participants were excluded from all analyses because their high ER exceeded the 25% error criterion. Five Chinese and six English nonword items yielded an error rate above 50% but no word targets met this exclusion criterion. The Sense Model’s predictions concern word targets, so these were the focus of analyses. Table 5 presents the results for all word conditions. An overall three-way ANOVA including the factors of target language, prime language and prime type yielded significant main effect of both target language and prime language, F1 (1, 30) = 81.95, p , .001; F2 (1, 126) = 194.85, p , .001, and F1 (1, 30) = 11.28, p , .05; F2 (1, 126) = 7.20, p , .05, respectively, because lexical classification was faster for Chinese than English targets and faster for targets preceded by Chinese than English primes. The main effect of prime type was also highly significant, F1 (1, 30) = 58.07, p , .001; F2 (1, 126) = 37.99, p , .001, because word targets preceded by related primes were responded to faster than following unrelated primes. Prime type interacted significantly with prime language and target language by subjects, F1 (1, 30) = 8.13, p , .05, and marginally so by items, F2 (1, 126) = 3.48, p = .06, because Chinese primes yielded significantly more priming than English primes, particularly for English word targets. To determine the basis of these interactions, follow-up simple effect comparisons assessed repetition and translation priming separately.

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Table 5. Mean RT (ms), standard errors (in parentheses), percentage error rates, and RT priming effects for within-language and between-language conditions for the lexical decision task of Experiment 1B Words Related Language condition Repetition L1-L1 L2-L2 Translation L1-L2 L2-L1

Unrelated

RT (SE)

ER

RT (SE)

ER

Priming

574 (18) 812 (27)

2,1 9,4

629 (22) 826 (28)

2,3 10,7

55** 15

726 (25) 608 (17)

8,3 1,4

854 (26) 620 (18)

12,1 2,1

127** 12

Note: **p , .001.

Repetition priming was highly significant in the L1-L1 condition, F1 (1, 30) = 32.77, p , .001; F2 (1, 63) = 28.32, p , .001, but not significant in the L2-L2 condition (all Fs , 1, ps . .1). The magnitude of the difference between the two conditions (40 ms) was marginally significant by subjects, F1 (1, 30) = 4.04, p = .055, but not significant by items (all Fs , 2.3, ps . .1). Translation priming was robust and highly significant in the L1-L2 condition, F1 (1, 30) = 39.52, p , .001; F2 (1, 63) = 28.09, p , .001, but not significant in the L2-L1 condition (all Fs , 2.6, ps . .1). The magnitude of translation priming was significantly larger (115 ms) from L1 to L2 than in the opposite direction, F1 (1, 30) = 26.84, p , .001; F2 (1, 63) = 24.65, p , .001, in line with previous findings of masked translation priming asymmetry in lexical decision (Dimitropoulou et al., 2011; Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Gollan et al., 1997; Grainger & FrenckMestre, 1998; Jiang, 1999; Jiang & Forster, 2001). The absence of repetition priming for English words suggested that the masked L2 primes were not sufficiently activated to support identity priming by the bilingual participants, so it is not surprising there was no evidence of L2L1 translation priming. Consistent with previous research, average RT to nonword targets (1003 ms, SD = 141 ms) was slower than that for words (715 ms, SD = 157

ms). There was also a large difference in error rate for words and nonwords: the average error rate for nonwords (21%) was substantially higher than that for words (6%). This was particularly marked for English nonwords, which yielded an error rate of 24% compared with the 18% error rate for Chinese nonwords. These error rates were much higher than those in the previous studies (e.g., 5.6% on English nonword trials in the bilingual experiment in Finkbeiner et al., 2004), perhaps because of the use of difficult nonword items and relatively low frequency words. Previous demonstrations of significant masked L2-L1 translation priming did not report the frequency of their word items (e.g., Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998; Wang & Forster, 2010) but we extracted frequency measures for their English words from CELEX to compare them with the present stimuli. The comparison showed that our critical English words were of lower frequency than those used in the previous experiments, i.e., mean frequency of 16 versus 70 or more occurrences per million. According to the RHM, higher frequency words are more likely to develop conceptual links and thus more likely to show L2-L1 translation priming. It is therefore possible that the use of lower frequency word stimuli, combined with the difficult decision environment created by using highly wordlike nonword stimuli, contributed to the failure

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to observe L2-L1 priming in the lexical decision task. The other notable feature of the data is the size of the L1-L2 translation priming effect. Although L1-L2 priming was robustly observed in the previous lexical decision studies summarized in Table 1, the magnitude of the effects were generally smaller, ranging from 19–68 ms in all except one study (Schoonbaert et al., 2009), which produced a 100 ms effect, approaching the 127 ms L1-L2 priming effect observed in our data. The large priming effect is most likely due to the use of a 200 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) created by interpolating a 150 ms mask between the 50 ms prime and the target. Schoonbaert et al. (2009) used an even longer SOA of 250 ms, because they added a 50 ms blank between the prime and pre-target mask. All but one of the other studies in Table 1 (Dimitropoulou et al., 2011, Experiment 2) that tested L1-L2 priming used an SOA of only 50–60 ms. Given that repetition and translation priming effects are functionally “savings” effects, due to the pre-processing of target-relevant features, a 50 ms “head start” cannot produce a priming effect of greater than 50 ms (Forster et al., 2003). The longer SOAs that we and Schoonbaert et al. (2009) used reveal that, with sufficient additional processing time, a 50 ms L1 prime can produce substantial priming for L2 translation equivalents. The magnitude of our effect may be further enhanced by the use of languages with different scripts. Gollan et al. (1997) argued that language-specific scripts provide a powerful cue that “unequivocally directs the reader to a specific lexicon” (p. 1134), and facilitates rapid access to the masked prime, supporting enhanced priming. The somewhat surprising finding that L1-L2 priming was larger than L1 repetition priming may reflect the substantially longer time required to identify L2 than L1 targets (804 ms vs 608 ms), which provides more opportunity for priming effects to emerge. In summary, Experiment 1 replicated previous findings of significant masked L2-L1 priming in semantic categorization that was restricted to category exemplars, but found no significant masked L2-L1 priming for the same stimuli in lexical

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decision. These findings are consistent with the Sense Model. However, both tasks yielded substantial translation priming asymmetry and crossexperiment analyses (reported below) provided no indication that the extent of this asymmetry significantly differed between semantic categorization and lexical decision. These findings challenge previous reports which have concluded that translation priming asymmetry is reduced in semantic categorization relative to lexical decision without directly comparing the effects across tasks (e.g., Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Wang & Forster, 2010).

EXPERIMENT 2A Experiment 2A aimed to evaluate whether our failure to find reduced priming asymmetry in the semantic categorization task of Experiment 1A was due to the use of relatively low frequency target words. To address this issue, Experiment 2A replaced the three categories containing the lowest average frequency exemplars from Experiment 1A (BIRD, FRUIT, VEGETABLE) with three categories containing higher frequency exemplars (RELATIVE, PROFESSION, PART OF A BUILDING) that had been used by both Finkbeiner et al. (2004) and Wang and Forster (2010). As a result, the mean frequency for word targets was more than three times higher than that of Experiment 1, i.e., 58 and 50 per million occurrences in English and Chinese respectively in the present experiment, compared with 16 and 10 per million occurrences in the previous experiment. Experiment 2A used the same blocked categorization procedure as Experiment 1A except for one procedural change. In Experiment 1A, we modified the usual procedure (e.g., Finkbeiner et al., 2004) by keeping the current category label, in the target language, on the screen throughout each block, to preclude any confusion about the currently relevant category and reduce the demands on memory created. However, to avoid any possibility that the visible category label might, itself, prime

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target exemplars,2 Experiment 2A used the standard procedure employed in previous studies (e.g., Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Wang & Forster, 2010) in which the relevant category label was presented only at the beginning of each block.

Method Participants A total of 32 participants were recruited from the same bilingual population as tested in Experiment 1A and 1B and paid for their participation in both Experiment 2A and 2B. None of them had taken part in the previous experiments. The selfratings of proficiency and usage (see Table 2) did not significantly differ from those for the sample tested in Experiment 1. Materials Experiment 2A used 64 pairs of compound Chinese words and their English translation equivalents as exemplars from six semantic categories (MAMMAL, CLOTHING, PART OF THE HUMAN BODY, RELATIVE, PROFESSION, PART OF A BUILDING), with 10 to 12 items per category. An additional 36 pairs were used as practice items on trials, 6 per category. An equal number of translation pairs were selected to serve as primes on control and practice trials. They were unrelated to their targets, but were matched with the critical primes for frequency, concreteness, imageability, and word length or stroke counts. As in Experiment 1A, the present experiment used exactly the same set of stimuli as both exemplars and non-exemplars in different category blocks. Stimulus validation To further assess the familiarity and translation equivalence of the Chinese-English word pairs, a translation production task was administered. After completing the experimental tasks, our bilingual

participants (N = 32) were asked to translate 128 compound Chinese words and their English translation equivalents in both directions. The participants were randomly assigned one of two counterbalanced lists of words which each included 64 critical target words (half in Chinese and half in English) intermixed with 64 fillers (the control items from the categorization task), none of which were members of the critical categories. Counterbalancing ensured that each participant saw only the English or Chinese word for each target concept to avoid intra-list priming of possible translations. They were instructed to write down the translation equivalent for each item, and leave a blank if they did not know the word so, like the typicality task used for Experiment 1, this procedure also assessed whether participants knew the meanings of the target words. The translation production results showed that, on average, the bilingual participants produced an appropriate translation for 97% of the English critical items (62 out of 64 items), demonstrating that they were familiar with the meanings of most of the English words. Critically, most of the translations in both directions were the expected English or Chinese words—95% and 98% for the L1-L2 and L2-L1 translations respectively. The results suggested that the majority of the ChineseEnglish word pairs appear to be represented lexically as accurate translation equivalents by our bilingual participants. Design and procedure The design and procedure of Experiment 2A were identical to Experiment 1A except for the revised stimuli and the fact that the category label was only presented once (for 5 seconds) at the beginning of each block.

Results and discussion Two participants were excluded from all analyses because their high error rates exceeded the 25%

2 It is unclear why semantic priming from a visible label which is in a different language and different script to the primes would differ from semantic priming from the memory representation of the category that is required to perform this task, and it therefore seems unlikely that this aspect of the procedure would influence the pattern of priming observed. Nevertheless, it seemed desirable to remove any procedural differences that might contribute to our failure to confirm the Sense Model’s predictions.

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Table 6. Mean RT (ms), standard errors (in parentheses), percentage error rates, and RT priming effects for within-language and betweenlanguage conditions for the exemplars and non-exemplar targets from the semantic categorization task of Experiment 2A Exemplars Related Language condition Repetition L1-L1 L2-L2 Translation L1-L2 L2-L1

Non-exemplars

Unrelated

Related

Unrelated

RT (SE)

ER

RT (SE)

ER

Priming

RT (SE)

ER

RT (SE)

ER

Priming

582 (13) 736 (23)

2,5 3,0

648 (16) 786 (27)

3,0 3,4

66** 50*

621 (15) 798 (24)

1,7 3,8

682 (19) 829 (28)

3,6 4,0

61** 31*

665 (24) 631 (14)

2,5 1,4

763 (25) 652 (15)

7,5 2,8

98** 21*

755 (31) 695 (16)

2,1 4,0

834 (31) 702 (17)

4,9 4,2

79** 7

Note: *p , .05; **p , .001.

error rate criterion and one item (MOUSE) which yielded an error rate above 50% was excluded from analysis of both the English and Chinese targets (0.8% of the data). The mean ER for the complete sample was 3%. The pattern of accuracy data was in the same direction as the latency data so is not reported further. Surprisingly, although the accuracy data confirmed that Experiment 2A was easier than Experiment 1A as expected given the higher frequency of the items, the average RTs for the complete data set (712 ms) were slower than those obtained in Experiment 1A (645 ms). Participants might have adopted a more cautious decision strategy and responded more slowly when they had to maintain the designated category in memory and decide whether each target is a member of the category or not. The overall four-way ANOVA showed that the main effect of target type was highly significant, F1 (1, 26) = 29.73, p , .001; F2 (1, 248) = 80.28, p , .001, reflecting faster average classification of exemplars than non-exemplars. There were also highly significant main effects of both target language, F1 (1, 26) = 27.99, p , .001; F2 (1, 248) = 350.61, p , .001, and prime language, F1 (1, 26) = 43.77, p , .001; F2 (1, 248) = 56.29, p , .001, because classification time was substantially faster for Chinese than English targets, and faster on average for words preceded by Chinese than English primes. The main effect of prime type was highly significant, F1 (1, 26) = 84.64,

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p , .001; F2 (1, 248) = 87.27, p , .001, reflecting faster classification following related primes. Prime type interacted with both prime language, F1 (1, 26) = 36.68, p , .05; F2 (1, 248) = 24.31, p , .001, and target language, F1 (1, 26) = 6.26, p , .05; F2 (1, 248) = 4.31, p , .05, because average priming effects were larger for targets preceded by Chinese primes than English primes and larger for English targets than Chinese targets. Separate analyses of exemplar and nonexemplar targets were conducted to determine the basis of these interactions. The left section of Table 6 presents the results for exemplars. Repetition priming effect was significant in both the L1-L1 condition, F1 (1, 26) = 21.15, p , .001; F2 (1, 62) = 23.76, p , .001, and the L2-L2 condition, F1 (1, 26) = 9.42, p , .05; F2 (1, 62) = 6.85, p , .05, which did not differ significantly (all Fs , 2, ps . .1). In the translation conditions, the priming effect was highly significant in the L1-L2 direction, F1 (1, 26) = 54.11, p , .001; F2 (1, 62) = 35.68, p , .001, and significant in the L2-L1 direction by subjects, F1 (1, 26) = 4.32, p , .05, but only marginally so by items, F2 (1, 62) = 3.66, p = .06. The 77 ms difference in the magnitude of L1-L2 vs L2-L1 priming was highly significant, F1 (1, 26) = 22.64, p , .001; F2 (1, 62) = 12.17, p , .001, demonstrating asymmetrical translation priming. The data for non-exemplars in the right section of Table 6 show that, like exemplars, they produced

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significant repetition priming in both the L1-L1 condition, F1 (1, 26) = 52.42, p , .001; F2 (1, 62) = 26.29, p , .001, and the L2-L2 condition, F1 (1, 26) = 7.66, p , .05; F2 (1, 62) = 6.63, p , .05. The 30 ms difference in the magnitude of L1 and L2 repetition priming was marginally significant by subjects, F1 (1, 26) = 4.19, p = .05, but not by items, F2 (1, 62) = 2.63, p = .11. Asymmetrical translation priming was also found for non-exemplars. The translation priming effect was highly significant in the L1-L2 direction, F1 (1, 26) = 25.11, p , .001; F2 (1, 62) = 25.80, p , .001, but not significant in the L2-L1 direction (all Fs , 1, ps . .1), and the L1-L2 priming effect was significantly larger than the L2-L1 priming effect, F1 (1, 26) = 9.35, p , .05; F2 (1, 62) = 8.32, p , .05. The magnitude of the asymmetry (72 ms) for non-exemplars was very similar to that for exemplars (77 ms) and, as in Experiment 1A, there was no significant difference in the magnitude of translation priming asymmetry between exemplars and nonexemplars (all Fs , 1, ps . .1). Although the new set of stimuli used in Experiment 2A had higher normative frequency on average, particularly for the English items, they yielded the same amount of L2-L1 priming for exemplars (21 ms) as the low frequency stimuli used in Experiment 1A. In fact, the mean frequency for the English stimuli (mean = 58 per million) was not quite as high as that for the stimuli used in the bilingual experiments of Finkbeiner et al. (2004) and Wang and Forster (2010) (mean = 87 and 88 per million respectively). However, the way that our stimuli were constructed allowed us to directly evaluate whether frequency modulated translation priming because half of them were selected from the lower frequency categories used in Experiment 1 (range 1 to 73 per million, mean = 23) and half of them from higher frequency categories (range 8 to 428 per million, mean = 90). This difference in average frequency closely paralleled the difference between average frequency for the English stimuli in Experiment 1A (mean = 16 per million) and that used in previous experiments (Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Wang & Forster, 2010). A follow-up analysis was therefore conducted that compared the three higher and lower frequency

categories. The analysis found a very similar asymmetrical pattern of translation priming across the higher and lower frequency categories due to significantly larger priming in the L1-L2 direction than the L2-L1 direction for both exemplars and nonexemplars. Numerically, priming effects tended to be larger for the lower frequency categories for both L1-L2 priming (107 vs 88 ms) and L2-L1 priming (23 vs 18 ms). However, none of the interactions between translation priming and frequency were significant (all Fs , 1, ps . .1), indicating that target frequency did not significantly modulate translation priming patterns under these masking conditions. These results confirm that our failure to find symmetrical translation priming in the semantic categorization task of Experiment 1A was not due to the use of lower frequency targets than those used in previous experiments.

EXPERIMENT 2B In Experiment 2B, the same critical stimuli from Experiment 2A were used as word targets in a lexical decision task. As well as including higher frequency word targets, the nonword targets were also modified to reduce the difficulty of the lexical discrimination demands of the task. For the English stimuli, half of the pronounceable nonwords from Experiment 1A were retained (e.g., DACK) and the other half were replaced with orthographically illegal nonwords (e.g., RKEE). The Chinese nonwords were still illegal combinations of two existing characters, but none of the characters were related to the critical categories. Hence both English and Chinese nonwords were less confusable with words than those used in Experiment 1B, reducing the difficulty of lexical discrimination. Apart from the change in stimuli, the design and the procedure were identical to Experiment 1B. The participants were the same as those in Experiment 2A.

Results and discussion Two participants were excluded from all analyses because their high error rates exceeded the 25%

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Table 7. Mean RT (ms), standard errors (in brackets), percentage error rates, and RT priming effects for within-language and between-language conditions for the lexical decision task of Experiment 2B Words Related Language condition Repetition L1-L1 L2-L2 Translation L1-L2 L2-L1

Unrelated

RT (SE)

ER

RT (SE)

ER

Priming

523 (14) 605 (23)

0,6 1,7

591 (16) 643 (26)

1,9 3,2

68** 38*

571 (21) 577 (15)

1,5 1,1

647 (24) 591 (16)

2,2 2,3

76** 14

Note: *p , .05; **p , .001.

error rate criterion. One English word item (CORRIDOR) and its Chinese translation equivalent (走廊) were removed from all conditions due to an error rate of above 50% in the English conditions. The outlier procedure excluded 0.8% of the data from the analyses. An overall ANOVA analysis conducted on word RT data summarized in Table 7 showed that the main effect of prime language was significant, F1 (1, 26) = 15.48, p , .05; F2 (1, 126) = 14.09, p , .001, and this effect interacted with target language, F1 (1, 26) = 7.23, p , .05; F2 (1, 126) = 4.36, p , .05, showing that average decision time was faster for word targets preceded by Chinese than English primes, and this effect was more pronounced for English than Chinese word targets. The main effect of prime type was highly significant, F1 (1, 26) = 65.20, p , .001; F2 (1, 126) = 41.03, p , .001, because word targets preceded by related primes were responded to faster than following unrelated primes. Prime type interacted significantly with prime language, F1 (1, 26) = 20.78, p , .001; F2 (1, 126) = 7.49, p , .05, because Chinese primes yielded stronger average priming effects than English primes. Prime type also interacted with target language, F1 (1, 26) = 6.70, p , .05; F2 (1, 126) = 4.36, p , .05, reflecting stronger priming for English than Chinese word targets. Follow-up comparisons showed that repetition priming effects were significant in both the L1L1 condition, F1 (1, 26) = 33.30, p , .001; F2 (1,

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62) = 13.76, p , .001, and the L2-L2 condition, F1 (1, 26) = 25.67, p , .001; F2 (1, 62) = 8.16, p , .05. Repetition priming was significantly larger (30 ms) for Chinese words than English words by subjects, F1 (1, 26) = 5.05, p , .05, but only marginally so by items, F2 (1, 62) = 2.91, p = .09. Highly significant L1-L2 translation priming occurred, F1 (1, 26) = 65.10, p , .001; F2 (1, 62) = 20.62, p , .001, but there was no significant L2-L1 priming, F1 (1, 26) = 2.87, p = .102; F2 (1, 62) = .69, p = .408. The 62 ms difference in L1L2 relative to L2-L1 translation priming was significant, F1 (1, 26) = 21.10, p , .001; F2 (1, 62) = 6.29, p , .05, showing that the easier lexical decision task yielded asymmetrical translation priming. Like the semantic categorization task of Experiment 2A, the lexical decision task of Experiment 2B provided no evidence that frequency modulated the patterns of translation priming. Again, the lower frequency targets yielded numerically (but not significantly) larger priming than the higher frequency targets across both translation conditions (L1-L2: 86 vs 66 ms; L2-L1: 17 vs 11 ms) and repetition conditions (L1-L1: 72 vs 64 ms; L2-L2: 45 vs 31 ms). The error rate for word and nonword targets was 2% and 3% respectively, indicating that the new nonwords reduced the decision difficulty. The error pattern was consistent with the RT pattern so no further error analyses are reported.

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The RT data replicated Experiment 1B in showing significant L1-L2 priming but non-significant L2-L1 priming. Unlike the more difficult lexical decision task of Experiment 1B, the data also showed significant masked repetition priming for English targets. This finding adds to previous evidence in the bilingual literature (e.g., Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Gollan et al., 1997) that masked L2 primes are able to produce repetition priming in unbalanced L1-dominant bilinguals. The significant repetition priming for L2 words confirms that, in the easier decision environment, unbalanced L1-dominant bilinguals were able to process and benefit from rapidly presented primes in their less dominant language (L2), and therefore suggests that the absence of L2-L1 priming in lexical decision was not due to the bilingual participants being unable to process the brief masked L2 primes. As in Experiment 1B, the L1-L2 priming effect was large relative to the forward translation priming effects observed in the previous studies summarized in Table 1, consistent with the view that such effects are enhanced by the use of longer SOAs and language-specific scripts (Gollan et al., 1997). However, for these higher frequency stimuli, L2L1 priming was similar in magnitude to L1 repetition priming (76 vs 68 ms), suggesting that the very large L2-L1 priming observed in Experiment 1B was exaggerated by the long average RT for low frequency L2 words.

Cross-experiment comparison To provide a complete picture of translation priming asymmetry across tasks, Figure 1 summarizes the translation priming effects in the semantic categorization tasks (Experiments 1A–2A) and the lexical decision tasks (Experiments 1B–2B). A final ANOVA analysis included experiment as a factor to directly compare the patterns of priming. This analysis revealed that the magnitude of the difference between L1-L2 and L2-L1 priming did not significantly interact with task type, task difficulty or exemplar status (all Fs , 1, ps . .1), indicating that the overall pattern of translation priming asymmetry for both exemplar and non-exemplar

Figure 1. Translation priming effects for the exemplar items in the two semantic categorization tasks (SCT; Experiments 1A and 2A) and for the word targets in the two lexical decision tasks (LDT; Experiments 1B and 2B).

targets in semantic categorization was similar to that for word targets in lexical decision. Planned comparisons testing the individual translation priming effects in both the L1-L2 and the L2-L1 directions also showed no significant interactions with experiment (all Fs , 2, ps . .1), demonstrating that the magnitude of masked translation priming in both the L1-L2 and the L2-L1 directions was statistically equivalent for the more and less difficult stimulus sets used in the two pairs of experiments.

GENERAL DISCUSSION The data broadly replicated previous findings that masked L2-L1 translation priming for noncognates in languages with different scripts is stronger in semantic categorization than in lexical decision (Finkbeiner et al., 2004; Wang & Forster, 2010). The L2-L1 priming effects for exemplars in the two semantic categorization tasks (both 21 ms) were significant, although only marginally so over items, and larger than the non-significant effects observed in the two lexical decision tasks (12 and 14 ms), albeit not significantly so. A more powerful experiment may yield significant differences between tasks. Certainly, the magnitude of the L2-L1 priming effects we obtained in the semantic categorization tasks are very similar to the 19 ms effect reported by Finkbeiner et al. (2004) for

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Japanese-English bilinguals and Wang & Forster’s (2010) 20 ms effect for Chinese-English bilinguals. The null L2-L1 priming effect observed in the two lexical decision tasks is also consistent with the majority of the studies summarized in Table 1. Finkbeiner et al. (2004) interpreted the task difference in masked L2-L1 priming as evidence that “priming is symmetrical … in semantic categorisation” (p. 1) without directly comparing it with L1-L2 priming for bilingual participants. The present data show that, when such a direct comparison is conducted, L2-L1 priming in semantic categorization is significantly smaller than L1-L2 priming, thereby providing no evidence for the symmetrical translation priming predicted by Finkbeiner et al. (2004). The data also provide no evidence of the more graded effects of category filtering assumed by Wang (2013). According to this view, even the category-relevant features of L1 words may be richer than those for L2, particularly for more proficient bilinguals. Asymmetry is therefore reduced rather than eliminated by the category filtering effects in semantic categorization tasks, at least for unbalanced bilinguals like those we tested. However, our data provided no evidence of significant differences in the strength of translation priming asymmetry across the two tasks. Although the difference between L1-L2 and L2-L1 priming was numerically smaller in semantic categorization than lexical decision in Experiment 1 (88 vs 115 ms), the reverse was true for the higher frequency target words and easier discrimination conditions used in Experiment 2 (77 vs 62 ms), and neither difference was significant. Despite this failure to confirm the changes in asymmetry predicted by the category filtering mechanism of the Sense Model, the data did replicate the finding of Finkbeiner et al. (2004) that L2L1 priming in the semantic categorization task was restricted to category exemplars. They found that the same items that produced significant L2-L1 priming when presented as exemplars in one experiment yielded no significant priming (4 ms) when presented as non-exemplars in a separate experiment using different semantic categories as targets. This result was claimed to confirm the

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category filtering account because the benefits arising from selection of category-relevant cues would only extend to exemplars of the currently relevant category. The present data strengthen the evidence that L2-L1 priming in semantic categorization is specific to exemplars by presenting the same items as both exemplars and non-exemplars within a single experiment. This means that nonexemplar items were exemplars of categories assessed in different blocks of the same experiment, whereas the non-exemplar items of Finkbeiner et al. (2004) were not related to any of the categories presented in the particular experiment. Nevertheless, Experiment 1A replicated their data by showing that the same items yielded a significant L2-L1 priming effect of 21 ms when presented as exemplars but a non-significant 8 ms effect when presented as non-exemplars. Virtually identical differences between L2-L1 priming for exemplars and non-exemplars (21 vs 7 ms) were observed for the new set of stimuli tested in Experiment 2B. Although the differential L2-L1 priming for exemplars and non-exemplars in semantic categorization is consistent with the Sense Model’s predictions, our direct comparison with L1-L2 priming does not support the category filtering account. If the category filtering that is responsible for reduced translation priming asymmetry is specific to exemplars, then the asymmetry should be greater for non-exemplar than exemplar items. The present data provide no support for this prediction: numerically, non-exemplars produced less translation priming asymmetry than exemplars in both semantic categorization tasks (59 vs 88 ms and 72 vs 77 ms in Experiments 1A and 2A, respectively), although the differences were not significant. Thus, the present findings challenge the Sense Model’s category filtering account by showing that although L2-L1 priming tends to be stronger in the semantic categorization than the lexical decision task, selectively for category exemplars, there is no evidence for the significantly more symmetrical priming predicted by the filtering mechanism. This begs the question of why masked L2-L1 translation priming appears to be enhanced in semantic categorization tasks. As detailed in the

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Introduction, semantic processing per se is not sufficient to explain the effect (Grainger & FrenckMestre, 1998) because it does not occur for all words, but only for exemplars. Some insight into this issue is provided by considering the within-language priming data. Such conditions make an important contribution to interpreting priming asymmetries but are not always included in investigations of cross-language priming—for example, they were absent from four of the nine papers summarized in Table 1. For the lower frequency target words used in Experiment 1, L2-L2 priming showed a similar pattern to L2-L1 priming of being stronger in semantic categorization than lexical decision, but only for exemplars. L2 words yielded robust repetition effects in semantic categorization for exemplars (42 ms) that were as large as those for L1 words but nonexemplars yielded a small (9 ms), non-significant L2 repetition priming effect similar to that observed in the Experiment 1B lexical decision task (15 ms). It is obvious that obtaining repetition priming from masked L2 words is a prerequisite for the L2-L1 translation priming. Otherwise the absence of the translation priming may simply indicate that “words in L2 are not processed effectively when they are masked” (Finkbeiner et al., 2004, p. 2), even when additional processing time is provided by inserting a mask between the prime and the target. However, Finkbeiner et al. (2004) did not directly compare L2-L2 repetition priming with L2-L1 translation priming for the same stimuli across tasks. In the present Experiment 1, L2-L2 repetition priming paralleled L2-L1 translation priming in occurring only for exemplars in the semantic categorization of Experiment 1A. Given the absence of significant L2 repetition priming for either nonexemplars or for word targets in the difficult lexical discrimination conditions of Experiment 1B, it is not surprising that neither of these conditions yielded significant L2-L1 translation priming. However, exactly the same L2 stimuli produced significant repetition and translation priming when they were exemplars of the semantic category relevant for that block. This implies that

membership of the relevant category somehow “boosts” the processing of masked L2 primes sufficiently to support both repetition priming and translation priming. The results of Experiment 2 strengthen the evidence that semantic processing of L2 primes is selectively enhanced for exemplars of the relevant semantic category. Under the less demanding conditions created by using higher frequency target words and easier word/nonword discrimination, significant L2 repetition priming was observed in both tasks, and for both exemplars and non-exemplars, demonstrating that the masked L2 primes were processed sufficiently quickly to support repetition priming. However, significant L2-L1 priming was still limited to exemplars in the semantic categorization task and was of exactly the same magnitude as in Experiment 1, demonstrating that it is independent of the strength of L2-L2 repetition priming. This confirms that something about these conditions selectively enhances the extent to which brief masked L2 primes activate the conceptual links required to yield translation priming. The apparent specificity of L2-L1 translation priming suggests that, at least for L1-dominant bilingual populations like those in the current experiments, the task context is a critical determinant of whether masked L2 primes yield sufficient activation of their lexical representation to support priming. Semantic categorization provides a context in which broad semantic features of a predefined category are activated by the category cue, which facilitates retrieval and/or decisions about items that are members of the category (Monsell, Doyle, & Haggard, 1989). In particular, the conceptually-mediated priming required for translation priming across noncognate languages like Chinese and English appears to require a “boost” in activation that is apparently triggered by presenting a category cue for semantic categorization. The fact that L2-L1 priming is not observed, even in semantic categorization tasks, when categories change from trial to trial (Sanchez-Casas et al., 1992) or for ad hoc categories (Wang & Forster, 2010) suggests that the boost in processing of masked L2 primes depends on the sustained activation of clearly defined, pre-existing categories,

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like those used by Finkbeiner et al. (2004) and in the present experiments. These effects are reminiscent of the early semantic influences of orthographic neighbours of category exemplars observed in semantic categorization tasks for monolingual English speakers (e.g., Forster & Hector, 2002; Rodd, 2004), which also appear to be restricted to blocked categorization tasks using well-defined categories. Monsell et al. (1989) interpreted these effects as evidence that a category cue pre-activates representations of category exemplars. Alternatively, Forster and Hector (2002) suggested that the early semantic effects could arise in models that allow cascaded feedforward processing (Rodd, 2004) from rapid activation of broad semantic features that are directly linked to lexical forms. In the case of masked translation priming, the priming effects may reflect feedback from semantics to lexical form representations. Specifically, semantic features pre-activated by category cues may be more readily activated by brief masked primes and, in turn, feedback from these features might strengthen the activation of the lexical representations of prime and target words that are members of the relevant semantic category. This feedback may compensate for the weaker lexical representations of L2 words, which take longer to activate than the richer, better-established representations for words in L1, particularly when L2 uses a different script that requires less practised processes than those used to decode words in the familiar script of L1 (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). This interpretation is supported by the present evidence that, at least under the more demanding conditions created by using lower frequency words, the selective benefits of semantic categorization on priming of category exemplars extends to within-L2 repetition priming, and that robust L2-L2 priming appears to be a prerequisite for finding significant L2-L1 priming. However, significant L2 repetition priming appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition to observe L2-L1 priming. The easier stimulus lists used in Experiment 2 yielded robust L2 repetition priming effects in lexical decision and for nonexemplars. But, as in Experiment 1, L2-L1

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translation priming was restricted to exemplars of the category relevant to that particular block. The semantic feedback hypothesis is supported by recent findings using event-related potential (ERP) measures to assess translation priming (e.g., Hoshino, Midgley, Holcomb, & Grainger, 2010; Midgley, Holcomb, & Grainger, 2009). Of particular relevance to the present study, Hoshino et al. (2010) and Midgley et al. (2009) compared masked within- and between-language priming for noncognate translations, blocked by target language, in a go/no-go semantic categorization task with a single well-defined category (e.g., ANIMAL). This general design is very similar to ours except that, although they both used the same 50 ms prime duration as our experiments, the duration of the subsequent masks, and therefore the prime-target SOAs, were shorter (80 and 67 ms in Hoshino et al. and Midgley et al. respectively). In unbalanced bilinguals with similar levels of self-rated L2 proficiency to our participants, these studies found that the N400 ERP component, which is assumed to index the mapping of lexical form onto meaning (Hoshino et al., 2010; Voga & Grainger, 2007), was significantly modulated by both translation and repetition priming. The earlier N250 component, which has been identified with the mapping of pre-lexical orthographic units onto whole word lexical forms (e.g., Grainger & Holcomb, 2009) was significantly influenced by within-language repetition priming in both L1 and L2, but showed translation priming effects only for L1-L2, not L2-L1, translation equivalents. Since the N250 component was sensitive to both L2-L2 repetition priming, where stimuli share both form and semantic features, and L1-L2 translation priming, where the noncognate EnglishFrench and Japanese-English translation pairs do not overlap in form, these authors argued that the L1-L2 translation priming effects are “more likely to reflect feedback from semantic representations activated by the prime stimulus influencing the activation of form-level representations during target word processing” (Hoshino et al., 2010, p. 167). This is consistent with Grainger and Holcomb’s (2009) proposal that priming effects on the N250 and N400 components are enhanced

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when feedforward and feedback processes interact or “resonate” to settle into a stable state. From this perspective, the absence of significant effects of L2-L1 priming on the N250 component is due to the relatively slow processing of masked L2 primes, particularly across languages with different scripts (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). At least in tasks requiring semantic processing, L2 primes are processed sufficiently to yield repetition priming effects on N250, but, with the short SOAs used by Midgley et al. (2009) and Hoshino et al. (2010), L2 primes are not processed quickly enough for semantic feedback to influence the lexical form representations of noncognate translations in L1. Consistent with this time course interpretation, Schoonbaert et al. (2010) found significant L2-L1 noncognate priming effects on N250 in a lexical decision task when primes were presented for 100 ms and followed by a 20 ms mask to yield a 120 ms SOA. Thus, the accumulating evidence about the impact of translation priming on ERP components suggests that early effects of L2-L1 priming may reflect feedback from semantic representations activated by the prime stimulus which can boost the activation of form-level representations during target word processing and support priming. Such effects can be observed in non-semantic tasks like lexical decision when the duration of L2 primes is long enough (Schoonbaert et al., 2010). However, although 50 ms prime displays like those used here appear to allow sufficient processing to support significant repetition priming of lexical decision responses, without the additional boost to relevant semantic features provided by the categorization task, L2 primes do not sufficiently activate translation equivalents to yield L2-L1 priming. Similarly, semantic categorization tasks with 50 ms primes and short SOAs, like those used by Midgley et al. (2009) and Hoshino et al. (2010), allow sufficient L2 processing to yield repetition priming, but do not support semantic feedback. The combination of a semantic categorization task and a longer SOA of 200 ms, as used by Finkbeiner et al. (2004) and the present experiments 1A and 2A, appears to allow further prime processing which boosts semantic feedback

enough to support masked L2-L1 priming. It remains to be seen whether these conditions will also yield significant L2-L1 priming effects on N250. The present findings have more general implications for theories of the relative contribution of lexically and conceptually mediated processes to translation priming asymmetry. Consistent with other recent evidence using the masked priming paradigm, the present results suggest that “all differences in translation priming … can be explained on the basis of the semantically mediated route” (Schoonbaert et al., 2009, p. 582). Because this route is stronger from L1-L2 than from L2L1, masked translation priming is robustly observed in the forward direction but is much more fragile and task-dependent in the backward, L2-L1, direction. This contrasts with the data obtained in the production tasks which inspired the claim of the initial RHM that translation from L2-L1 in unbalanced bilinguals relies on lexical, rather than conceptual, links with direct access to meaning from L2 word forms only developing for highly proficient bilinguals (Kroll & Stewart, 1994). However, subsequent evidence demonstrating semantic influences on L2-L1 translation (Dufour & Kroll, 1995), even in relatively low proficiency bilinguals, appeared to challenge this assumption. As recently elaborated by Kroll et al. (2010), the RHM’s prediction of lexically mediated L2-L1 translation was specific to non-proficient bilinguals’ performance in translation production tasks. Comprehension tasks, like the lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks investigated here differ in the nature and time course of cross-language activation. The RHM did not deny the possibility that L2 words can directly retrieve L2 concepts, but proposed that these connections are weaker than those for L1 words. The degree of reliance on that weak link is assumed to be a function of a range of factors, including L2 proficiency, task requirements and word frequency (Kroll & Tokowicz, 2005). Conceptually mediated priming may also be essential for noncognate languages with different scripts in which there is no sublexical similarity to support the development of lexical links.

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One limitation of the RHM framework acknowledged by Kroll et al. (2010) is its assumption that L2-concept links are bidirectional and, therefore, equally weak in both directions. They argue that recent evidence suggests that this link is, in fact, asymmetrical, “in the sense that access from words to concepts may be accomplished easily … [while] access from concepts to words is more effortful” (Kroll et al., 2010, p. 375). Assuming asymmetrical connections between L2 word forms and concepts would allow the feedback interactions implied by the ERP findings to be incorporated into the RHM framework. The preactivation of category-relevant features by a category cue might strengthen the feedback from concepts to L2 word forms, thereby enhancing repetition priming and creating conditions that potentiate semantically mediated L2-L1 translation priming. Such a modification to the RHM framework provides a quantitative account of differences between L1-L2 and L2-L1 priming rather than the qualitative account usually attributed to the original RHM model: “that L2 words (unlike L1 words) are not mapped directly onto semantics, but … primarily access meaning through their L1 translation equivalent” (Schoonbaert et al., 2009, p. 570). A qualitative account of translation priming asymmetry is also provided by Jiang and Forster’s (2001) episodic model, which assumes that although L1 words are represented in semantic memory, L2 words are, at least initially, only represented as part of an episodic memory trace that also includes their L1 translation equivalent. By contrast, both the Sense Model and the semantic feedback hypothesis offer quantitative accounts in which the identification of both L1 and L2 words rely on the same general form of representation, but differ in their strength or speed of activation (Schoonbaert et al., 2009). In the Sense Model the source of these quantitative differences lies in the greater number of senses associated with L1 and L2 words, while the semantic feedback account attributes it to the strength of the feedback from semantic to form-level representations which, in turn, determines the degree to which form-level representations are activated by a masked prime (Hoshino et al., 2010). Such quantitative accounts

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have the virtue of providing a parsimonious account of why patterns of translation priming asymmetry vary both between tasks, as demonstrated here, and between participants as a function of their level of proficiency and/or language dominance (e.g., Wang, 2013). In conclusion, although the present experiments replicated the finding of Finkbeiner et al. (2004) that L2-L1 priming is somewhat stronger in semantic categorization than lexical decision, selectively for category exemplars, direct comparison of L1-L2 with L2-L1 translation priming provided no evidence that masked translation priming asymmetry differed significantly between semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks as predicted by the category filtering mechanism of the Sense Model. However, the results support the more general claim of Finkbeiner et al. (2004) that cross-script masked L2-L1 translation priming is enhanced for category exemplars in semantic categorization tasks and confirm that L2 repetition priming is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for observing L2-L1 translation priming. The results suggest that pre-activating the features of well-defined categories in the semantic categorization task boosts the degree to which L2 word forms activate their conceptual representation and allows semantic feedback from the prime to support activation of the lexical form of the target, thereby increasing the likelihood of observing significant L2-L1 priming. Further research is necessary to more precisely specify the conditions required for such priming to emerge. Original manuscript received 9 February 2014 Accepted revision received 17 April 2014 First published online 10 September 2014

REFERENCES Altarriba, J., & Basnight-Brown, D. M. (2007). Methodological considerations in performing semantic and translation priming experiments across languages. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 35(5), 953–965.

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Appendix A. Experimental items (translation equivalents) from Experiment 1A MAMMAL Exemplar

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

狐狸 狮子 猴子 猎狗* 熊猫 斑马 考拉* 骆驼 袋鼠 鲸鱼

fox lion monkey hound* panda zebra koala* camel kangaroo whale

杜鹃 菠菜 樱桃 膝盖 裙子 燕子 玉米 苹果 牙齿 斗篷

cuckoo spinach cherry knee skirt swallow corn apple tooth cloak

BIRD Exemplar

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

鸽子 乌鸦* 鸵鸟* 企鹅 杜鹃 燕子 大雁 孔雀 云雀 画眉

pigeon crow* ostrich* penguin cuckoo swallow goose peacock lark thrush

狐狸 茄子 柚子 胳膊 裤子 斑马 豆角 草莓 鼻子 头盔

fox eggplant grapefruit arm pants zebra beans strawberry nose helmet

VEGETABLE Exemplar

322

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

菠菜 茄子 洋葱 蘑菇 萝卜* 芋头 玉米 豆角 生姜 黄瓜 辣椒* 豌豆

spinach eggplant onion mushroom radish* taro corn beans ginger cucumber capsicum* peas

狮子 乌鸦 柠檬 肩膀 衬衫 肚子 考拉 大雁 西瓜 手指 夹克 下巴

lion crow lemon shoulder shirt belly koala goose watermelon finger jacket chin

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FRUIT Exemplar

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

樱桃 柚子 柠檬 椰子* 橄榄 苹果 草莓 西瓜 木瓜* 芒果

cherry grapefruit lemon coconut* olive apple strawberry watermelon papaya* mango

猴子 洋葱 皮肤 袜子 鸽子 骆驼 生姜 胡子 画眉 围巾

monkey onion skin socks pigeon camel ginger beard thrush scarf

BODY PART Exemplar

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

膝盖 胳膊 肩膀 皮肤 肝脏 肚子 牙齿 鼻子 手指 胡子 乳房 下巴

knee arm shoulder skin liver belly tooth nose finger beard breast chin

猎狗 鸵鸟 蘑菇 椰子 西装 芋头 袋鼠 孔雀 黄瓜 芒果 胸罩 豌豆

hound ostrich mushroom coconut suit taro kangaroo peacock cucumber mango bra peas

CLOTHING Exemplar

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

袜子 衬衫 裙子 西装 裤子 斗篷* 夹克 围巾 胸罩 头盔

socks shirt skirt suit pants cloak* jacket scarf bra helmet

熊猫 企鹅 萝卜 橄榄 肝脏 鲸鱼 云雀 辣椒 木瓜 乳房

panda penguin radish olive liver whale lark capsicum papaya breast

*Items were excluded from analyses because of high error rates (above 50%)

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Appendix B. Experimental items (translation equivalents) from Experiment 2A MAMMAL Exemplar

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

猴子 老鼠* 老虎 狮子 大象 绵羊 兔子 狐狸 骆驼 熊猫

monkey mouse* tiger lion elephant sheep rabbit fox camel panda

厨房 厕所 妈妈 儿子 司机 农民 乳房 胡子 毛衣 裤子

kitchen toilet mother son driver farmer breast beard sweater pants

BODY PART Exemplar

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

牙齿 乳房 下巴 膝盖 舌头 鼻子 手指 肚子 耳朵 肩膀 胡子

tooth breast chin knee tongue nose finger belly ear shoulder beard

大厅 电梯 叔叔 妹妹 护士 律师 演员 领带 围巾 狮子 绵羊

hall elevator uncle sister nurse lawyer actor tie scarf lion sheep

CLOTHING Exemplar

324

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

夹克 围巾 头盔 衬衫 领带 帽子 裙子 裤子 袜子 手套 毛衣

jacket scarf helmet shirt tie hat skirt pants socks gloves sweater

走廊 窗户 妻子 爸爸 法官 医生 编辑 膝盖 耳朵 熊猫 狐狸

corridor window wife father judge doctor editor knee ear panda fox

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PART OF A BUILDING Exemplar

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

大厅 地板 电梯 窗户 楼梯 厨房 卧室 屋顶 走廊* 厕所

hall floor elevator window stairs kitchen bedroom roof corridor* toilet

丈夫 女儿 教师 作家 舌头 肚子 衬衫 帽子 兔子 老鼠

husband daughter teacher writer tongue belly shirt hat rabbit mouse

RELATIVE Exemplar

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

阿姨 叔叔 妹妹 哥哥 丈夫 女儿 妻子 爸爸 妈妈 儿子

aunt uncle sister brother husband daughter wife father mother son

屋顶 地板 会计 歌手 牙齿 手指 夹克 裙子 猴子 大象

roof floor accountant singer tooth finger jacket skirt monkey elephant

PROFESSION Exemplar

Non-exemplar

Chinese

English

Chinese

English

法官 医生 教师 歌手 演员 司机 作家 护士 农民 编辑 律师 会计

judge doctor teacher singer actor driver writer nurse farmer editor lawyer accountant

卧室 楼梯 阿姨 哥哥 肩膀 鼻子 下巴 手套 袜子 头盔 骆驼 老虎

bedroom stairs aunt brother shoulder nose chin gloves socks helmet camel tiger

*Items were excluded from analyses because of high error rates (above 50%)

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Masked translation priming asymmetry in Chinese-English bilinguals: making sense of the Sense Model.

Masked translation priming asymmetry is the robust finding that priming from a bilingual's first language (L1) to their second language (L2) is strong...
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