Dimitropoulou, M. 1, 2 , Duñabeitia, J. A. 1 & Carreiras, M. 1, 3, 4
1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Donostia. Spain.
2 University of La Laguna
3 Ikerbasque. Basque Foundation for Science
4 Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea – Universidad del País Vasco
Non-cognate masked translation priming studies with unbalanced bilinguals performing lexical decisions show larger effects in the dominant (L1) to non-dominant (L2) translation direction, than vice versa. Importantly, this asymmetry is eliminated with balanced native-like bilinguals, suggesting that L2 proficiency may play a critical role in the pattern of the obtained effects. The present study addressed this issue by testing three groups of unbalanced Greek-English bilinguals with different levels of L2 proficiency. Participants performed lexical decisions on the same set of English and Greek targets primed by their non-cognate translations. Even though participants´ performance improved as a function of increased L2 proficiency, the pattern of masked translation priming effects remained identical across the three levels of proficiency, always replicating the previously established asymmetry. The overall pattern of findings is discussed in relationship with current models of bilingual word recognition and processing.