Bilingual lexical processing: Exploring the cognate/non-cognate distinction

Abstract Three experiments examine whether the differential sensitivity to priming found for cognate and non-cognate translations in the masked primed lexical decision task is also apparent in other tasks. Experiments 1 and 3 employed tasks which specifically require the use of lexical information (i.e. a semantic categoxisation task and a cued translation task) and both produced results complementary to those found for lexical decision. The second experiment used a repetition blindness task which does not include a linpistic component. Although it has been argued that the repetition blindness and masked priming tasks tap a similar process (Kanwisher, 1987). the repetition blindness task did not show a cognate effect. This was taken to suggest that it taps a level different from that tapped in the masked priming task.