One measure of conceptual implicit memory is repetition priming in the generation of exemplars from a semantic category, but does such priming transfer across languages? That is, do the overlapping conceptual representations for translation equivalents provide a sufficient basis for such priming? In Experiment 1 (N = 96), participants carried out a deep encoding task, and priming between langua...

It has been well documented in the literature that translation equivalents have special status in bilinguals’ lexical system and can be treated as synonymy across languages. It has been claimed that translation equivalents are overlapped at the conceptual level across languages with different orthographic and phonological forms. Evidence to support this claim comes from cross-language priming s...

To be able to reach the level of ultimate attainment in the second language, learners need to acquire not only the grammar of the L2 but also the language processing mechanisms involved in the comprehension of sentences in real time. Contrary to its importance, very little is known yet about online L2 processing. This study examines whether advanced Iranian learners of English reactivate disloc...

Structural priming refers to the tendency of speakers to reuse the same structural pattern as one that was previously encountered (Bock, 1986). The effectiveness of structural priming has been an issue of much discussion in the field of second language acquisition over decades. This study aims at investigating the role of structural priming in Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learner...

Structural priming, the tendency to repeat previously uttered syntactic structures, can give insight into human language processing and acquisition. We report two corpus-based studies of children’s structural priming that test the following claim of the item-based account of language acquisition: as older children generalize over structures, priming increases with age. A hypothesis derived from...

This study examines structural priming in an on-line reading task that compares reading performance by first and second language readers of English. Robust effects for priming were evident for the second, but not first, language readers, suggesting that priming may occur where there are insufficient sentence traces in memory to support sentence interpretation. The empirical results are simulate...

In this paper we describe an experimental study of crosslanguage priming effects between Chinese and English. The priming effects for both translation equivalents and semantically related word pairs were examined from a developmental aspect, in particular under three different situations according to bilinguals’ second language (English) proficiency level measured by CPVT and language history q...

Previous studies have failed to find evidence for long-term cross-language repetition priming (e.g., presentation of the English word frog does not facilitate responding to its Dutch translation equivalent kikker on a later presentation). The present study tested the hypothesis that failure to find cross-language repetition priming in previous studies was due to the use of tasks that rely prima...