Language dominance in translation priming: Evidence from balanced and unbalanced Chinese–English bilinguals

Abstract

It is well established in the masked translation priming literature that the priming effect is sensitive to language direction with noncognates—namely, the priming effect is consistently observed from first language (L1) to second language (L2), but not always from L2 to L1. Several recent reports demonstrated both L1–L2 and L2–L1 priming and attributed the restoration of L2–L1 priming to high proficiency in L2. Here, the current study tested two groups of highly proficient Chinese–English bilinguals, with one group more dominant in English and the other more balanced in both languages. The L2–L1 priming effect was only observed with the balanced bilinguals, but not the English-dominant ones. Based on these results, I argue that the language proficiency account is not sufficient to explain the priming asymmetry and that the relative bilingual balance is a more accurate account. Theoretically, the cross-language balance is determined by the representational difference between L1 and L2 at the semantic level. I discuss the results in relation to various bilingual models, in particular, the sense model and the distributional representational model (DRM), which capture the semantic representations of bilinguals.

Keywords:

• Bilingualism
• Translation priming
• Language dominance

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the valuable comments and support I received from Ken Forster at various stages of the manuscript, as well as Dawn Ku's help in recruiting bilingual subjects for this study. I thank three anonymous reviewers and Wouter Duyck for their constructive comments. This research was supported by the MOE-ARF (Ministry of Education–Academic Research Fund) grant to Xin Wang by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore. The results have been presented at the 2009 conference Neurobilingualism: Bilingual Functioning from Infancy to Adulthood.

Notes

¹ This paper focuses on translation priming experiments that adopted Forster & Davis's (1984) paradigm where the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 50 ms.

² The A level is the short form for Cambridge General Certificate of Education Advanced Level, which is a national examination for languages in Singapore prior to the university admission.

³ No single-character Chinese words were chosen to serve as targets in the English–Chinese direction in order to avoid having two different types of Chinese nonword targets—one created by changing a stroke (single characters), the other by an illegal combination of characters.

⁴ Under usual conditions, the forward mask is “###”. However, when the prime is the Chinese character, the participants were able to detect the existence of the prime based on the author's experimental experiences. Therefore, as in Wang and Forster (2010), the author replaced the “###” with a extremely low-frequency Chinese character for a better masking effect on the prime so that the participants were not aware of the Chinese primes. This low-frequency character was selected from the ancient Chinese texts and does not appear in modern Chinese texts any more.

⁵ To ensure the masking effect, font sizes of Chinese primes and English targets in the Chinese–English direction differed from those in the English–Chinese direction because characters were slightly bigger than alphabets of the same size in presentation. Empirical testing in DMDX showed that alphabets of Size 13.5 proceeded by characters of Size 10 was able to produce similar masking effects to those in the other direction (Forster & Forster, 2003).

⁶ There are two ways to think about priming asymmetry: One is the absence of priming versus priming; the other is the significantly larger priming magnitude in one direction than the other.