Language dominance in translation priming: evidence from balanced and unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals

It is well established in the masked translation priming literature that the priming effect is sensitive to language direction with noncognates-namely, the priming effect is consistently observed from first language (L1) to second language (L2), but not always from L2 to L1. Several recent reports demonstrated both L1-L2 and L2-L1 priming and attributed the restoration of L2-L1 priming to high proficiency in L2. Here, the current study tested two groups of highly proficient Chinese-English bilinguals, with one group more dominant in English and the other more balanced in both languages. The L2-L1 priming effect was only observed with the balanced bilinguals, but not the English-dominant ones. Based on these results, I argue that the language proficiency account is not sufficient to explain the priming asymmetry and that the relative bilingual balance is a more accurate account. Theoretically, the cross-language balance is determined by the representational difference between L1 and L2 at the semantic level. I discuss the results in relation to various bilingual models, in particular, the sense model and the distributional representational model (DRM), which capture the semantic representations of bilinguals.