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Effect of multiple translations and cognate status on translation recognition performance of balanced bilinguals*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2012

ROGER BOADA ,
ROSA SÁNCHEZ-CASAS ,
JOSÉ M. GAVILÁN ,
JOSÉ E. GARCÍA-ALBEA  and
NATASHA TOKOWICZ
ROGER BOADA*
Affiliation:
Research Center for Behavior Assessment (CRAMC), Department of Psychology, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
ROSA SÁNCHEZ-CASAS
Affiliation:
Research Center for Behavior Assessment (CRAMC), Department of Psychology, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
JOSÉ M. GAVILÁN
Affiliation:
Research Center for Behavior Assessment (CRAMC), Department of Psychology, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
JOSÉ E. GARCÍA-ALBEA
Affiliation:
Research Center for Behavior Assessment (CRAMC), Department of Psychology, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
NATASHA TOKOWICZ
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Roger Boada, Departament de Psicologia, Facultat de Ciències de l'Educació i Psicologia, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Ctra de Valls s/n, 43007 Tarragona, Spainroger.boada@urv.cat
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Abstract

When participants are asked to translate an ambiguous word, they are slower and less accurate than in the case of single-translation words (e.g., Láxen & Lavour, 2010; Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007). We report an experiment to further examine this multiple-translation effect by investigating the influence of variables shown to be relevant in bilingual processing. The experiment included cognates and non-cognates with one translation or with multiple translations. The latter were presented with their dominant or subordinate translations. Highly-proficient balanced bilinguals responded to a translation recognition task in the two language directions (Catalan–Spanish and Spanish–Catalan). The results showed a significant multiple-translation effect in both cognates and non-cognates. Moreover, this effect was obtained regardless of language dominance and translation direction. Participants were faster and more accurate when performing translation recognition for the dominant than for the subordinate translations. The findings are interpreted adopting the Distributed Representation Model (de Groot, 1992b).

Keywords

translation ambiguitymultiple translationscognate statustranslation recognition
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 183 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

This research has been supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (PSI2009-12616/Plan E), by a grant of Generalitat de Catalunya (2009-SGR-401), and by NSF BCS-0745372 awarded to the last author. We wish to thank the students from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili who participated in the study.

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