title: Theoretical and methodological implications of language experience and vocabulary skill: priming of strongly and weakly associated words.
abstract: The effect of second language experience and vocabulary ability was investigated in a semantic priming experiment with weakly related English word pairs (e.g., city-grass). Participants made lexical decisions to targets preceded by unrelated or weakly related primes or to nonword targets preceded by words. Reliable priming was found for monolingual participants; participants who had acquired a second language showed either marginal or nonreliable effects. A similar pattern of results was found with the analysis of vocabulary ability. Only participants with the greater vocabulary ability showed a priming effect. Although previous research has shown that participants with a broad range of linguistic backgrounds demonstrate the typical semantic priming effect (e.g., green-grass) with strongly associated word pairs, weaker relationships seem to require an extensive contextual history for retrieval.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA. zana@psychgrad.org
authors.forename: Zana
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Devitto
authors.forename: Curt
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Burgess
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D019303:Multilingualism; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011582:Psychological Theory; D012016:Reference Values; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary; D014936:Word Association Tests