Wang Xin
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston 60201, IL, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2013;66(4):727-43. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2012.716072. Epub 2012 Sep 18.
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.
在隐蔽翻译启动文献中，有充分证据表明启动效应对于非同源词的语言方向很敏感——也就是说，启动效应始终是从第一语言（L1）到第二语言（L2）被观察到，但并非总是从L2到L1。最近的几份报告既证明了L1-L2启动效应，也证明了L2-L1启动效应，并将L2-L1启动效应的恢复归因于对L2的高度熟练掌握。在此，本研究测试了两组高度熟练的汉英双语者，一组在英语方面更占优势，另一组在两种语言上更为平衡。L2-L1启动效应仅在语言平衡的双语者中观察到，而在以英语为主的双语者中未观察到。基于这些结果，我认为语言熟练程度的说法不足以解释启动不对称现象，相对的双语平衡是一个更准确的说法。从理论上讲，跨语言平衡是由L1和L2在语义层面的表征差异决定的。我将结合各种双语模型，特别是捕捉双语者语义表征的感觉模型和分布表征模型（DRM）来讨论这些结果。
