Can masked synonym priming replicate masked translation priming?

This study examines whether synonyms are represented similarly to translation equivalents in the bilingual mind. In particular, this study investigated whether there is masked synonym priming such that it will simulate masked translation priming in the L1-L2 direction. Given that masked translation priming studies consistently show priming in the L1-L2 direction, it was predicted that synonyms should show a masked priming effect if the prime was higher in frequency than the target. Contrary to what Bilingual Interactive Activation models would predict, there was no priming for synonyms in the high-to-low frequency (HF-LF) condition or in the low-to-high frequency (LF-HF) condition in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 only tested the HF-LF condition to ensure that previous exposure to LF words within the experiment did not affect the results. Again, no HF-LF synonym priming was observed. The effect sizes of these synonym priming effects were comparable with that of L2-L1 translation priming, all of which were weak. This is not surprising given that semantic interpretation of a given word usually occurs post-lexically and requires partial awareness. What is surprising is that there is robust evidence showing strong L1-L2 masked translation priming effect, which bilingual lexical processing models should attempt to explain, thereby uncovering the relations between L1 words and their L2 translations.