Cross Language Priming in Normal Bilingual Adults

Abstract

Bilingualism, more generally, multilingualism, is a major fact of life in the world today. Bilinguals have opened up newer portals for research as one cannot consider a bilingual as two monolinguals in one person and generalize results from monolingual studies. The nature of bilingual lexical organization is an enduring question in bilingual research. Two major theoretical view-points have been dominant. First, the language specific hypothesis and the language-independent hypothesis. Numerous models lia1 •e been proposed to support or refute either of these two hypotheses. A variety of experimental tasks have been employed to study the bilingual mental lexicon. Among the online tasks the primed lexical decision task has been frequently used to study bilingual lexical organization. The present study employs the visual pair-wise LDT in a cross-language translation and semantic priming paradigm. A total of thirty normal bilingual adults in the age range of 18-40 years served as subjects. Amongst the thirty, they were further grouped as high proficient bilinguals (HP) and low proficient (LP) users of English on the basis of ratings obtained on the International Second Language Proficiency Rating Scale ( ISLPR). They participated in the priming experiment, in both the language-order conditions i.e. Kannada-English and English-Kannada. Stimulus presentation was controlled by DMDX software. The reaction times of all the critical targets were subjected to statistical analysis using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The results of the reaction time analysis in general reveal asymmetry in cross-language priming. The findings are explained in the light of the revised hierarchical model (RHM).