Are translation equivalents really equivalent? Evidence from concreteness effects in translation priming.

Abstract

Translation equivalents intuitively seem to overlap in meaning. Moreover, the models of the bilingual lexicon often represent the meaning shared between two translations as a holistic node in the semantic network. However, research on semantic representation and processing questions this holistic approach. For instance, abstract words are assumed to be more language-dependent, while concrete words’ meanings are seen as more consistent cross-linguistically.<p>

<p>The non-cognate translation priming paradigm offers an ideal methodological setting to study semantic overlap (proxied by concreteness) between translations. Priming effects between non-cognate translation equivalents are assumed to emerge due to spreading activation at the semantic level. Hence, a larger semantic overlap between translation prime-target pairs should lead to larger priming effects. Nevertheless, the evidence from previous translation priming studies investigating concreteness displays a blurry picture, potentially reflecting a shared limitation: their relatively small sample sizes. We overcame this problem by analyzing the largest translation priming dataset to date.