Non-cognate translation priming effects in the same-different task:evidence for the impact of 'higher level' information

摘要

Norris and colleagues have proposed that priming effects observed in the masked prime same-different task are based solely on pre-lexical orthographic information. This proposal was evaluated by examining translation priming effects from non-cognate translation equivalents using both Spanish-English and Japanese-English bilinguals in the same-different task. Although no priming was observed for Spanish-English bilinguals, who also produced very little translation priming in a lexical decision task, significant priming was observed for Japanese-English bilinguals. These results indicate that, although most of the priming in the same-different task has an orthographic basis, other types of priming effects can emerge. Therefore, while the masked prime same-different task provides a good way of investigating the nature of orthographic coding, it, like the sandwich priming technique, can also be influenced by higher level information.