Translation equivalent and cross-language semantic priming in bilingual toddlers

• Published in: Journal of memory and language Vol. 112; p. 104086
• Main Authors: Floccia, Caroline, Delle Luche, Claire, Lepadatu, Irina, Chow, Janette, Ratnage, Paul, Plunkett, Kim
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.06.2020
• Subjects: Bilingual lexicon; Language distance; Language dominance; Priming; Toddlers; Word processing; Word processing; Language distance; Bilingual lexicon; Priming; Toddlers; Language dominance
• ISSN: 0749-596X; 1096-0821
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2019.104086

•Translation equivalent priming and cross-language semantic priming are found in bilingual 27-month-olds.•Contrary to adult findings, timescale and magnitude are similar for these two types of priming.•Contrary to adult findings, no effect of language dominance is found.•Contrary to model predictions, no effect of language distance is found.•The early bilingual lexicon may not be a miniature version of the adult one. In adult bilinguals, a word in one language will activate a related word in the other language, with language dominance modulating the direction of these effects. To determine whether the early bilingual lexicon possesses similar properties to its adult counterpart, two experiments compared translation equivalent priming and cross-linguistic semantic priming in 27-month-old bilingual toddlers learning English and one other language. Priming effects were found in both experiments, irrespective of language dominance and distance between the child’s two languages. The time course of target word recognition revealed a similar pattern for translation equivalent priming and cross-language semantic priming. These results suggest that the early bilingual lexicon possesses properties similar to the adult one in terms of word to concept connections. However, the absence of an advantage of translation equivalent priming over semantic priming, and the lack of dominance and language distance effects, suggest that when two languages are acquired in parallel during infancy, their integration within a single dynamic system is highly robust to input variations.