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The effect of age of L2 acquisition on the organization of the bilingual lexicon: Evidence from masked priming*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2013

LAURA SABOURIN ,
CHRISTIE BRIEN  and
MICHELE BURKHOLDER
LAURA SABOURIN*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa
CHRISTIE BRIEN
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa
MICHELE BURKHOLDER
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa
*
Address for correspondence: Laura Sabourin, Linguistics Department, University of Ottawa, 70 Laurier Ave. E., Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5Canada[email protected]
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Abstract

This study investigates the role of age of acquisition (AoA) on the bilingual mental lexicon. Four groups of participants were tested: (i) English native speakers with minimal exposure to French; (ii) late English–French bilinguals; (iii) early English–French bilinguals; and (iv) simultaneous English–French bilinguals. We used a masked priming paradigm to investigate early, automatic lexical processing at the semantic level by testing both a within-language semantic condition and a cross-language translation condition. AoA was investigated both through group effects and a correlation analysis. We found significant translation priming effects for the simultaneous and early bilinguals only, and a significant correlation between AoA and translation priming effects. Due to the matched L2 proficiency of the early and late bilinguals, these results support our hypothesis that an early AoA, regardless of L2 proficiency, is crucial in order to find the L2-to-L1 priming effects that have often been elusive in recent studies.

Keywords

bilingualismAoAmasked primingtranslation primingmental lexicon
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 542 - 555
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Joanne LaMontagne and Seiko Sagae for help with early preparation of this experiment, and Julie Arseneau, Aysegul Kutlu, Sameer Ratti, Marie-Claude Tremblay and Santa Vinerte and other members of the Brain and Language Lab for help with testing participants. We further thank Joe Roy for consulting with us about the Linear Mixed Model statistical design. We also thank Kenneth Forster and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported by a seed fund grant from the University of Ottawa and from a SSHRC grant to the first author.

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