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Lexical and semantic connections in number words translation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2017

AMPARO HERRERA
AMPARO HERRERA*
Affiliation:
University of Murcia, Spain
*
Address for correspondence: Amparo Herrera, Departamento de Psicología Básica y Metodología, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Murcia, Campus de Espinardo, 30100, Murcia, Spainaherrera@um.es
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Abstract

The present study investigated the influence of lexical links and conceptual mediation in number word translation. In four experiments, a semantic blocking paradigm was used with numerical stimuli and stimuli from other non-number categories. The performance of Spanish L1–English L2 bilinguals was examined in backward and forward translation (Experiment 1 and 3), in naming Arabic digits and pictures (Experiment 2A) and in reading L1 and L2 words (Experiment 2B). The blocked context produced a facilitatory effect for numerical stimuli in the lower range. This result contrasts with the interference effect observed for stimuli from non-number categories in translation and naming tasks. These results are interpreted to mean that the translation of number words, particularly those in the lower range of the numeric sequence, takes place with a large influence of the lexical connections. It supports the suggestions that the influence of processing routes depends on the type of items.

Keywords

number wordstranslationsemantic blocking paradigm
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 177 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

The work reported here was supported by the Programa de Generación de Conocimiento Científico de Excelencia de la Fundación Séneca- Agencia de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Región de Murcia (research project 08741/PHCS/08). I wish to thank Ana María Flores and Verónica Juárez for helping in testing participants. I wish to thank Pedro Macizo for his worthy comments about this work.

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