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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 6:4 (2016) ► pp.440–466
Article

Cross-language priming as a means of investigating bilingual conceptual representations

A comparison of visual and auditory modality

| King’s College London
| King’s College London

Cross language priming in the visual modality is a well-established paradigm that offers insights into the representation of the bilingual mental lexicon; however, here we employ a novel form of priming, (i.e., an animacy decision task), to test previous outcomes. In addition, this study is the first to carry out an auditory priming task with bilingual Chinese-English speakers. Thus, we report on two experiments in which the participants decided whether visually (Experiment 1) or auditorily (Experiment 2) presented stimuli were exemplars of living entities or non-living things. The tasks allowed for addressing the priming effect, the priming asymmetry effect, and in turn allowed for testing the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994). Priming effects, where the related targets were responded to more rapidly compared to unrelated targets, were observed in both modalities in the L1 to L2 condition; however, no priming effects were found from L2 to L1. The findings obtained in this study support the use of primed animacy decision tasks in either modality as a valid tool for investigating bilingual lexical memory. Also, the observed priming effects allow for retaining the RHM in its original form.

Keywords: bilingualism, mental lexicon, priming, animacy decision task, visual modality, auditory modality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Revised Hierarchical Model
  • 3.Priming effect and priming asymmetry
  • 4.Priming in an auditory modality
  • 5.Experiment one – visual priming
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Materials
    • 5.3Design and procedure
    • 5.4Results and discussion
  • 6.Experiment two – auditory priming
    • 6.1Participants
    • 6.2Materials
    • 6.3Design and procedure
    • 6.4Results and discussion
  • 7.General discussion
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 January 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.14020.tyt
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