Resumen de Cross-lingual transfer effects between English and Italian cognates and noncognates

Erin Lalor, Kim Kirsner

• Two experiments were implemented to examine the proposition that transfer effects between English and Italian translations are restricted to words from the same lexical paradigm. The experiments involved standard repetition priming, a traditional laboratory procedure, and a comparative analysis of the impact of high frequency and low frequency words in one language on performance in an alternative language. The two procedures supported the same conclusion, and showed that transfer effects are restricted to morphologically related words, and that, for the subjects used in our experiments, transfer was asymmetric, involving facilitation for second language words only. The results are discussed with reference to functional accounts of the mental lexicon.