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Is translation priming asymmetry due to partial awareness of the prime?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2014

XIN WANG Open the ORCID record for XIN WANG [Opens in a new window]  and
KENNETH FORSTER
XIN WANG*
Affiliation:
Oxford University
KENNETH FORSTER
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
*
Address for correspondence: Xin Wang, PhD. 15 Norham Gardens, Oxford University, Oxford, OX2 6PY, UKxinwang267@gmail.com
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Abstract

A 50ms prime duration is often adopted in both L1-L2 and L2-L1 directions in the cross-language priming paradigm. It is unknown how aware bilinguals are of the briefly presented primes of different scripts; and whether the degree of awareness of L1 and L2 primes is at a similar level. Kouider and Dupoux's (2004) proposal of partial awareness suggests that 50ms English primes were sufficient to make a semantic interpretation. It is unclear whether this is the case when processing one's L2 or a different script. Experiment 1 was designed to measure the comparable prime durations for semantic interpretation of Chinese primes vs. English primes. Experiment 2 tested whether partial awareness of primes would cause priming asymmetry. Our findings demonstrate that a 50ms prime duration gave rise to different degrees of semantic activation in different scripts and L1/L2. However, increasing prime duration on L2 primes did not produce L2-L1 priming.

Keywords

partial awarenesscross-script translation primingpriming asymmetryChinese–English bilingualsthe bilingual lexicon
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 657 - 669
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Thanks to Robert DeKeyser and Jon Andoni Duñabeitia and three anonymous BLC reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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