This study examines whether synonyms are represented similarly to translation equivalents in the bilingual mind. In particular, this study investigated whether there is masked synonym priming such that it will simulate masked translation priming in the L1-L2 direction. Given that masked translation priming studies consistently show priming in the L1-L2 direction, it was predicted that synonyms should show a masked priming effect if the prime was higher in frequency than the target. Contrary to what Bilingual Interactive Activation models would predict, there was no priming for synonyms in the high-to-low frequency (HF-LF) condition or in the low-to-high frequency (LF-HF) condition in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 only tested the HF-LF condition to ensure that previous exposure to LF words within the experiment did not affect the results. Again, no HF-LF synonym priming was observed. The effect sizes of these synonym priming effects were comparable with that of L2-L1 translation priming, all of which were weak. This is not surprising given that semantic interpretation of a given word usually occurs post-lexically and requires partial awareness. What is surprising is that there is robust evidence showing strong L1-L2 masked translation priming effect, which bilingual lexical processing models should attempt to explain, thereby uncovering the relations between L1 words and their L2 translations.

中文翻译：

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作者接受稿件：屏蔽同义词启动能否复制屏蔽翻译启动？

本研究考察了双语思维中同义词的表示方式是否与翻译中的对等词相似。特别是，本研究调查了是否存在掩码同义词启动，从而模拟 L1-L2 方向上的掩码翻译启动。鉴于掩蔽翻译启动研究始终显示 L1-L2 方向的启动，据预测，如果启动频率高于目标，同义词应显示掩蔽启动效应。与双语互动激活模型预测的相反，实验 1 中的高频到低频 (HF-LF) 条件或低频到高频 (LF-HF) 条件下没有同义词启动。 实验2 只测试了 HF-LF 条件，以确保之前在实验中接触过 LF 词不会影响结果。再次，没有观察到 HF-LF 同义词启动。这些同义词启动效应的效应大小与 L2-L1 翻译启动的效应大小相当，但都是微弱的。鉴于给定单词的语义解释通常发生在词后并且需要部分意识，这并不奇怪。令人惊讶的是，有强有力的证据显示强大的 L1-L2 掩蔽翻译启动效应，双语词汇处理模型应该尝试解释，从而揭示 L1 单词与其 L2 翻译之间的关系。