Language representation and processes in bilingual memory

The presented work in this dissertation focusses on different kinds of representations in bilingual memory, using the priming method as a promising tool to investigate cross-linguistic interactions. The first two empirical chapters (Chapter 2 and 3) mainly investigate semantic representations across languages, but also investigate how a word’s lexical representation in the first or the second language (in this case, its orthographic code in the lexicon) accesses its/their meaning. Chapter 2 will solely rely on behavioral measures of bilingual word recognition, whereas in Chapter 3 also electrophysiological measures will be included. The third empirical chapter (Chapter 4) has its main focus on how syntactic structures are represented across languages. In this last chapter, we also explored if and how lexical and syntactic representations interact across languages, in bilingual dialogue

Letter position coding in printed word perception: Effects of repeated and transposed letters

International audienceWe report four experiments investigating the effects of repeated and transposed letters in orthographic processing. Orthographically related primes were formed by removing one letter from the target word, by transposing two adjacent letters, or by replacing two adjacent letters with different letters. Robust masked priming in a lexical decision task was found for primes formed by removing a single letter (e.g., mircle -MIRACLE), and this was not influenced by whether or not the prime contained a letter repetition (e.g., balace vs. balnce as a prime for BALANCE ). Target words containing a repeated letter tended to be harder to respond to than words without a letter repetition, but the nonwords formed by removing a repeated letter (e.g., BALNCE) were no harder to reject than nonwords formed by removing a non-repeated letter (e.g., MIRCLE, BALACE). Significant transposition priming effects were found for 7-letter words (e.g., sevrice -SERVICE), and these priming effects did not vary as a function of the position of the transposition (initial, final, or inner letter pair). Priming effects disappeared when primes were formed by replacing the two transposed letters with different letters (e.g., sedlice -SERVICE), and five-letter words only showed priming effects with inner letter transpositions (e.g., ponit -POINT). We present a revised ``open-bigram'' scheme for letter position coding that accounts for these data

Semantic and translation priming from a first language to a second and back: Making sense of the findings

The present study investigated cross-language priming effects with unique noncognate translation pairs. Unbalanced Dutch (first language [L1])-English (second language [L2]) bilinguals performed a lexical decision task in a masked priming paradigm. The results of two experiments showed significant translation priming from L I to L2 (meisje-GIRL) and from L2 to L I (girl-MEISJE), using two different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (250 and 100 msec). Although translation priming from L I to L2 was significantly stronger than priming from L2 to L 1, the latter was significant as well. Two further experiments with the same word targets showed significant cross-language semantic priming in both directions (jongen [boy]-GIRL; boy-MEISJE [GIRL]) and for both SOAs. These data suggest that L1 and L2 are represented by means of a similar lexico-semantic architecture in which L2 words are also able to rapidly activate semantic information, although to a lesser extent than L I words are able to. This is consistent with models assuming quantitative rather than qualitative differences between L I and L2 representations