title: Not just semantics: strong frequency and weak cognate effects on semantic association in bilinguals.
abstract: To investigate the possibility that knowledge of two languages influences the nature of semantic representations, bilinguals and monolinguals were compared in a word association task. In Experiment 1, bilinguals produced less typical responses relative to monolinguals when given cues with a very common associate (e.g., given bride, bilinguals said "dress" instead of "groom"). In Experiment 2, bilinguals produced responses as typical as those of monolinguals when given cues with high-frequency associates, but not when given cues with low-frequency associates. Bilinguals' responses were also affected, to a certain extent, by the cognate status of the stimulus word pairs: They were more similar to monolinguals' responses when the cue and its strongest associate were both cognates (e.g., minute-second is minuto-segundo in Spanish), as opposed to both being noncognates. Experiment 3 confirmed the presence of a robust frequency effect on bilingual but not on monolingual association responses. These findings imply a lexical locus for the bilingual effect on association responses and reveal the association task to be not quite as purely semantic as was previously assumed.
authors.affiliation: Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. iantonme@une.edu.au
authors.forename: Inés
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Antón-Méndez
authors.forename: Tamar H
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Gollan
mesh_terms: D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D019303:Multilingualism; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D014175:Translating; D014936:Word Association Tests