Language and Learning Seminar:

Speaker: Adel Chaouch Orozco, University of Reading

Title: "The nature of the bilingual lexicon: Investigating translation priming and its predictors"

Abstract:

I present a series of studies investigating the bilingual lexicon’s organisation and functioning, employing visual translation priming, one of this field’s most productive methodological tools. We assessed the contribution of individual-, word- and methodology-level factors. The first study explored the effects of second language (L2) proficiency, L2 use and word frequency in translation masked priming. The second study, employing unmasked primes, focused on investigating L2 use, word frequency, and degree of semantic overlap. The third study used distributional analyses to compare the cognitive processes recruited during masked and unmasked priming experiments. Overall, our results showed that word frequency—prime frequency in particular—is a robust predictor of translation priming. Some evidence suggests that language use plays a relevant role in the bilingual lexicon’s functioning, while the effect of L2 proficiency in our data is negligible. Further, we showed that the degree of semantic overlap modulated the priming effects. Finally, our results indicated that cognitive recruitment differs in masked and unmasked priming experiments. These findings have several implications. 1) Experiential and word-level factors should be further investigated in translation priming studies, especially treated continuously and focusing on interactions. 2) The models of the bilingual lexicon would benefit from adopting a distributed view of semantic representation. 3) Studies examining response times should include distributional analyses as they provide unique insights into the cognitive mechanisms at play.

Language and Learning Seminar convenor: Dr Marta Wesierska

Marta will email TEAMS links to Department, but you can email Marta for link too.