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Journal of Memory and Language 58 (2008) 916–930

Journal of Memory and Language
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Masked associative/semantic priming effects across languages with highly proficient bilinguals
Manuel Perea a,*,1, Jon Andoni Dunabeitia b, Manuel Carreiras b ˜
a

` ´ ´ ´˜ Universitat de Valencia, Departamento de Metodologıa, Facultadde Psicologıa, Av. Blasco Ibanez, 21, 46010 Valencia, Spain b ´ Departamento de Psicologıa Cognitiva, Universidad de La Laguna, 38205 Tenerife, Spain Received 27 June 2007; revision received 31 October 2007 Available online 6 March 2008

Abstract One key issue for models of bilingual memory is to what degree the semantic representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language.In the present paper, we examine whether there is an early, automatic semantic priming effect across languages for noncognates with highly proficient (Basque/Spanish) bilinguals. Experiment 1 was a between-language masked semantic priming lexical decision experiment. Results showed a significant between-language semantic priming effect for both Basque–Spanish and Spanish–Basque pairs. Experiment 2showed that the magnitude of the between-language and within-language masked semantic priming effects was quite similar. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of Experiment 2 with highly proficient bilinguals whose mother tongue was Spanish. Thus, highly fluent bilinguals develop early and automatic between-language links with noncognates at the semantic level, as predicted by the hierarchical revisedmodel and the BIA+ model. We examine the implications of these results for models of bilingual memory. Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Conceptual representations; Bilingualism; Masked priming; Semantic priming

One key issue for models of bilingual memory is to what degree the semantic representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language (e.g., chair andsilla for English–Spanish bilinguals). Although it is generally assumed that there is a separate word-form lexicon for the two languages
Corresponding author. Fax: +34 96 3864697. E-mail address: mperea@valencia.edu (M. Perea). URL: http://www.uv.es/mperea (M. Perea). 1 Present address: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 43 Vassar Street, 46-4033Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
*

and a shared semantic level, allowing cross-language semantic priming (i.e., hierarchical models; see French & Jacquet, 2004, for review), the empirical evidence is not fully conclusive. Indeed, a recent review of the literature on semantic representations in bilinguals included in the Handbook of Bilingualism (Kroll & de Groot, 2006) concluded that ‘‘the evidence maynot be strong enough to confirm completely shared representations at the semantic level” (Francis, 2005, p. 260). This is not surprising when one takes into account that most research has focused on individuals who, although they are proficient in a second language (L2), have not learnt this

0749-596X/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2008.01.003M. Perea et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 58 (2008) 916–930

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L2 in a natural environment. Under those circumstances, lexical development in the second language may be quite different from lexical development in the first language (e.g., see Basnight-Brown, ´ Chen, Hua, Kostic, & Feldman, 2007; Bosch, Costa, ´ & Sebastian-Galles, 2000; Brysbaert, 2003; Jiang & Forster, 2001). In thepresent study, we focus on early highly proficient bilinguals: individuals who have been acquiring the two languages on a daily basis since early childhood. Thus, the basic question the present paper attempts to answer is: for highly fluent bilinguals, to what degree does a word in one of the languages have early and automatic access to a shared conceptual (semantic) representation?2

Early and...