INVESTIGATING TRANSLATION EQUIVALENT PRIMING: THE IMPACT OF TASK, ITEM, AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Date

2023-9-29

Author

Oğuz, Enis

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Bilingualism has been a longstanding focus of language research, yet many questions surrounding it still lack conclusive answers. Extensive research has attempted to reveal one such mystery by using cross-linguistic word pairs, specifically the potential interaction between the languages of a bilingual. Although cognate and false cognate pairs are common ways to carry out such an investigation, high orthographic or phonological overlap between such pairs might result in accessing L1 words directly without the need to activate their L2 counterparts. One way to overcome this limitation is to use translation equivalents, which possess high semantic similarities but little to no orthographic and phonological overlap in language pairs like English and Turkish. In this dissertation, lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks were used to investigate whether translation equivalents activate each other in the early stages of word processing. A cohort of 101 highly proficient bilinguals (Turkish-English) participated in the study. The potential effects of task type, prime duration, word frequency, and individual differences were also explored under different conditions. The results indicated that highly proficient bilinguals activate the counterparts of translation equivalents preconsciously after being exposed to these words for brief durations, and this activation was similar in both language directions. The responses were faster when prime words had higher frequencies, the task required purely lexical decisions, or the participants were at higher L2 proficiency levels. In light of these findings, it is concluded that the differences between the processing of L1 and L2 words seem more quantitative than qualitative.

Subject Keywords

translation priming asymmetry, task and individual differences, frequency effect, prime duration

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/105423

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis