Non-cognate translation priming effects in the same–different task: evidence for the impact of “higher level” information

Abstract

Norris and colleagues have proposed that priming effects observed in the masked prime same–different task are based solely on pre-lexical orthographic information. This proposal was evaluated by examining translation priming effects from non-cognate translation equivalents using both Spanish–English and Japanese–English bilinguals in the same–different task. Although no priming was observed for Spanish–English bilinguals, who also produced very little translation priming in a lexical decision task, significant priming was observed for Japanese–English bilinguals. These results indicate that, although most of the priming in the same–different task has an orthographic basis, other types of priming effects can emerge. Therefore, while the masked prime same–different task provides a good way of investigating the nature of orthographic coding, it, like the sandwich priming technique, can also be influenced by higher level information.

Keywords:

• orthographic code
• masked priming
• same–different task
• non-cognate translation equivalents
• lexical decision task

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Sachiko Kinoshita and an anonymous reviewer for their contribution during the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Note that no identity priming manipulation was included in Experiments 3–5. This manipulation had been included in Experiments 1 and 2 as a manipulation check because translation priming effects in lexical decision are often quite weak for same-script bilinguals. Due to the fact that translation priming effects are extremely robust for proficient Japanese–English bilinguals in lexical decision, we had no a-priori concern that our translation pairs would fail to produce a priming effect in Experiment 3.

2. The authors would like to thank Sachiko Kinoshita, in her role as reviewer, for offering this suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Grant [grant number A6333] to Stephen J. Lupker, by Grant [grant number PSI2011-26924] from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to Manuel Perea, and by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) [grant number #24730630] to Mariko Nakayama.