《Semantic and Form Interference Effects in Translation Recognition in Early and Late Proficient》.pdf

Language Learning 56:4, December 2006, pp. 571–608 C 2006 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan Can a Horse Be a Donkey? Semantic and Form Interference Effects in Translation Recognition in Early and Late Proficient and Nonproficient Spanish-Catalan Bilinguals Pilar Ferr´e, Rosa S´anchez-Casas, and Marc Guasch Universidad Rovira i Virgili The present study investigates the developmental as- pect of the revised hierarchical model (Kroll Stewart, 1994) concerning the access to the conceptual store from the second language (L2). We manipulated the level of proficiency and age of L2 acquisition. We tested Spanish- Catalan bilinguals (49 early proficient bilinguals, 28 late proficient bilinguals, and 28 late nonproficient bilinguals) in a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. The second word of the pair could be the true translation, a word related in form, a word more or less related in meaning, or an unrelated word. The results showed that both early and late proficient bilinguals were more sensitive to the semantic than to ´ ´ ´ Pilar Ferre, Departamento de Psicologıa; Rosa Sanchez-Casas, Departa- ´ ´ mento de Psicologıa; Marc Guasch, Departamento de Psicologıa. This research has been supported by a grant from the Spanish Min- istry of Education and Science (BSO 2003-04854). Marc Guasch also has a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (BES 2004- 6211). We would like to acknowledge the collaboration of students an