Reaction Time in Masked Semantic Priming Experiments with Persian vs. English Primes

Abstract

The psycholinguistics field has long been concerned with bilinguals’ mental lexicon; the way bilingualsrestore words in their mental lexicon and the way they retrieve them. So the representation of languagesin bilingual minds has been explored by many researchers within the field. And different researches haveled to different results. The more information regarding bilingual memory is acquired; better imagewould be constructed about this knowledge representation. The present study is an attempt toinvestigate if bilinguals share semantic features of their L1 and L2 using masked semantic primingparadigm. In masked priming, the primes were presented for a very short time and they were covered bya mask or a row of hash marks (####).Target-prime pairs addressed in the study were semanticallyrelated words in two experiments. In both of the experiments target words were in English, but theprimes were in Persian in the first experiment and in English in the second. Reaction time of sixtyPersian-English bilinguals for these prompts was measured by DMDX software. Results showed thatsemantic priming effect under masked conditions could not find in any of the experiments. The findingsindicate that bilinguals have shared semantic representation for two languages with different scriptsonly for the cognate words. Results suggest that using semantically related words, for non-cognate words,in the process of language teaching is useful in advanced proficiency levels.