Repetition priming within and between languages in semantic classification of concrete and abstract words

Abstract

Although concrete nouns are generally agreed to have shared core conceptual representations across languages in bilinguals, it has been proposed that abstract nouns have separate representations or share fewer semantic components. Conceptual repetition priming methodology was used to evaluate whether translation equivalents of abstract nouns have shared conceptual representations and compare the degree of conceptual overlap for concrete and abstract nouns. Here 72 Spanish–English bilinguals made concrete–abstract decisions on English and Spanish nouns. Both concrete and abstract nouns elicited substantial between-language priming and these effects were of equivalent size, indicating that translation equivalents of both concrete and abstract nouns have shared conceptual representations and that abstract words do not share fewer components. The between-language priming effects and their attenuation relative to within-language priming indicate that the within-language effect is based on facilitation of both word comprehension and semantic decision processes.

Keywords:

• Repetition priming
• Concreteness
• Bilingual

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by NIH Grant MH61765 to the first author. We thank Silvia P. Sáenz and Juan Fernández for assistance with data collection.