Getting your wires crossed: evidence for fast processing of L1 idioms in an L2

• Autores: Gareth Carrol, Kathy Conklin
• Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 17, Nº 4, 2014, págs. 784-797
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Monolingual speakers show priming for idiomatic sequences (e.g. a pain in the neck) relative to matched controls (e.g. a pain in the foot); single word translation equivalents show cross-language activation (e.g. dog-chien) for bilinguals. If the lexicon is heteromorphic (Wray, 2002), larger units may show cross-language priming in the same way as single words. We used the initial words of English idioms (e.g. to spill the. . . beans) and transliterated Chinese idioms (e.g. draw a snake and add. . . feet) as primes for the final words in a lexical decision task with high proficiency Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals. Bilinguals responded to targets significantly faster when they completed a Chinese idiom (e.g. feet) than when they were presented with a matched control word (e.g. hair). The results are discussed in terms of conceptual activation and lexical translation processes, and are also incorporated into a dual route model of formulaic and novel language processing.