Masked Translation Priming Effects in Visual Word Recognition by Trilinguals

The present study aims to investigate how trilinguals process their two non-dominant languages and how those languages influence one another, as well as the relative importance of the dominant language on their processing. With this in mind, 24 French (L1)- English (L2)- and Spanish (L3)-unbalanced trilinguals, deemed equivalent in their L2 and L3 were recruited. They were asked to perform two series of lexical decisions in the two non-native languages (L2 and L3), with a masked translation priming paradigm. Target words in both languages were primed by either the same word (repetition), a translation (in one of the other languages) or an unrelated word (in L1, L2 or L3). The results highlighted a strong link between prime and target, with an effect of repetition for both target languages. Moreover, a translation priming effect was demonstrated, only when the primes belongs to the dominant L1, i.e. L2 and L3 target words were identified faster when they were primed by the L1 translation. No translation priming effects were found for L2 and L3 primes. These results are in line with a multilingual lexicon organized by the L1, with a lack of cross-language interactions between the two non-dominant languages.