Masked translation priming with Japanese–English bilinguals: Interactions between cognate status, target frequency and L2 proficiency

Abstract

Masked translation priming effects were examined for Japanese–English bilinguals using both cognate and noncognate translation equivalents. In Experiment 1, L1 primes and L2 targets were used to examine translation priming effects as a function of target frequency and bilinguals' L2 proficiency. Translation priming effects for cognates were significantly larger than for noncognates, replicating the cognate priming advantage previously reported with different-script bilinguals. In addition, translation priming effects were significantly larger for low- than for high-frequency targets and for less- than for more-proficient bilinguals, whereas the size of the cognate priming advantage was unaffected by either target frequency or L2 proficiency. In Experiment 2, cognate translation priming effects were tested in the L2–L1 direction. There was a significant cognate translation priming effect regardless of L2 proficiency. These results are consistent with the phonological account of the cognate priming advantage, which proposes that cognate translation priming effects are due to the additive effects of phonological and conceptual factors.

Keywords:

• Bilingualism
• Cognate
• Cognate priming advantage
• Cross-script masked translation priming
• Masked priming
• Noncognate

We thank Jon Duñabeitia and an anonymous reviewer for their excellent feedback and suggestions.

This research was supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) to Mariko Nakayama.

We thank Jon Duñabeitia and an anonymous reviewer for their excellent feedback and suggestions.

This research was supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) to Mariko Nakayama.

Notes

¹ The Test of English as International Communication (TOEIC) is administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and consists of two sections of 100 questions each (listening and reading). The test requires about 2.5 hours to complete and assesses a broad range of English skills, especially in business settings. The test scores range from 0 to 990, with higher values indicating greater fluency in English. In Japan, approximately 750,000 people take the test annually, and the test scores are accepted by many schools and organizations as a measure of English proficiency. Bilinguals with a score in the range of 860–990 are deemed to be highly proficient non-native English speakers. Bilinguals with scores in the range of 730–855 are regarded as less proficient in English by comparison, but still highly fluent in English.

² Normative frequencies were based on the NTT database (Amano & Kondo, 2000), which provides frequency counts based on a corpus of 287,792,797 words. The normative frequencies reported here are per million words, created by dividing the original frequencies by 287.8.

³ An alternative way of degrading the prime would have been to have used a backward mask between the prime and target. We chose to present brackets to serve as a backward mask for any prime letters extending beyond the target so that our procedures would be as close as possible to the standard three-field masked priming procedure adopted in many previous masked priming studies (see Kinoshita & Lupker, 2003), in which targets are shown immediately after primes that are presented for less than 60 ms.

⁴ In this analysis, regression slopes for cognate and noncognate translation priming effects were statistically compared. The inter-correlation between the two measures (i.e., cognate and noncognate priming effects, which were provided by the same group of participants) was taken into consideration when computing the t-statistic value (Steiger, 1980).