Bilingual Resonance: Reactivating Text Elements Between Language 1 & Language2

LEA, B., VAN DEN BROEK, P., CEVASCO, J., & MITCHEL, A.

California, Estados Unidos

Conferencia; 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society; 2007

Psychonomic Society

  Memory-based text processing research has focused on how distal text concepts are reactivated by an automatic resonance process. In a typical experiment, an adjective-noun pair such as “leather couch” is presented as a contextual cue early in a passage, and then repeated later in the passage.  Concepts associated with the first instance of the cue are reactivated upon presentation of the second instance of the cue.  Researchers agree that feature overlap is fundamental to triggering resonance, but little is known about how overlap is defined psychologically.  We gave English-Spanish bilinguals passages that were partly in English and partly in Spanish, and crossed L1 and L2 with the beginning and end of each passage to determine the effect that cue encoding in one language has on the translated counterpart encoded in the other language.   The results showed robust resonance effects both within and between languages, and a modest L2 proficiency effect.