Masked translation priming effects with low proficient bilinguals

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Bilingualism Research
• Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

• Masked translation priming (MTP) studies often show asymmetric effects in unbalanced bilinguals, with priming stronger from L1 to L2.
• Recent findings reported bidirectional MTP effects in low-proficiency bilinguals, challenging existing models.
• The role of L2 proficiency in MTP effects remains a key area of investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate MTP effects in late, low-proficiency Greek (L1)-Spanish (L2) bilinguals.
• To determine if bidirectional MTP effects, as reported by Duyck & Warlop (2009), would be observed in this population.
• To examine the influence of L2 proficiency on cross-linguistic activation patterns.

Main Methods:

• A series of masked translation priming lexical decision experiments were conducted.
• Participants were late bilinguals with low proficiency in Spanish (L2) as a second language.
• The directionality of priming effects (L1 to L2 vs. L2 to L1) was systematically analyzed.

Main Results:

• Significant masked translation priming effects were observed exclusively in the L1 (Greek) to L2 (Spanish) direction.
• This finding contrasts with Duyck & Warlop's (2009) report of bidirectional effects in low-proficiency bilinguals.
• The results align with the majority of MTP literature indicating an asymmetric priming pattern.

Conclusions:

• The masked translation priming asymmetry is present even in low-proficiency bilinguals.
• This suggests that automatic cross-linguistic lexico-semantic links are established early in L2 acquisition.
• L2 proficiency level is a crucial factor in understanding bilingual language processing models.