Effects of Concreteness on Cross-Language Priming in Lexical Decisions

Korean-English bilinguals were shown a prime word in one language for 150 msec, followed by a word or nonword in the other language which required a lexical decision. Target words which were translations of the preceding word showed a substantial (96 msec.) priming effect compared to unrelated target words; targets semantically associated to the translation also showed a significant though smaller priming (56 msec). For both types of target and for both target languages, the priming effect was greater for concrete word-pairs than for abstract word-pairs. In contrast, a second experiment with monolinguals gave equivalent priming for concrete and abstract pairs. The results support the hypothesis of Saegert and Young and of Paivio and Desrochers that the two lexicons of the bilinguals are most closely integrated via a common, nonverbal representation.