Research Article

Semantic access during Turkish and English visual word processing in translation students: A case of semantic Simon paradigm

Number: 28 June 21, 2022
TR EN

Semantic access during Turkish and English visual word processing in translation students: A case of semantic Simon paradigm

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate semantic meaning activation in L1 and L2 during low-level word processing, i.e., case judgment tasks using the semantic Simon paradigm. Turkish-English bilingual participants who were divided into two “translators” and “bilinguals” were asked to judge target words’ letter cases by responding “animal” to uppercase targets and “occupation” to lowercase targets. The findings of the study were in line with the previous results in which faster responses were obtained both in the first language (L1) and second language (L2) when the verbal response corresponded to the semantic category, although semantic content was irrelevant to the task itself. In other words, faster responses were observed in congruent condition (e.g., verbal response “animal” to DOG) than incongruent condition (e.g., verbal response “animal” to SOLDIER). There was not any significant effect of the group (either translator or bilingual) on both response times and accuracy. Groups’ mean response times did not differ significantly from each other both in L1 and L2. Consequently, the present study supports the view that semantic access and form-to-meaning mappings may occur automatically and fast in L2 as they do in L1, and it may be possible that lexical representations of words in both languages may develop direct semantic access while student translators process the words visually.

Keywords

References

  1. Aksan, Y. et al. (2012). Construction of the Turkish National Corpus (TNC). In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012). İstanbul.
  2. Turkiye. http://www.lrecconf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/papers.html
  3. Amso, D., & Casey, B. J. (2009). Cognitive Control and Development. Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, 1095–1099. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-008045046-9.00412-5
  4. De Houwer, J. (1998). The semantic Simon effect. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A: Human Experimental Psychology, 51A(3), 683–688. https://doi.org/10.1080/027249898391585
  5. De Houwer J. (2003). The Extrinsic Affective Simon Task. Experimental psychology, 50(2), 77–85. https://doi.org/10.1026//1618-3169.50.2.77
  6. De Houwer, J., Crombez, G., Baeyens, F., & Hermans, D. (2001). On the generality of the affective Simon effect. Cognition and Emotion, 15(2), 189–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/0269993004200051
  7. De Houwer, J., & Eelen, P. (1998). An affective variant of the Simon paradigm. Cognition and Emotion, 12(1), 45–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999398379772
  8. Duscherer, K., Holender, D., & Molenaar, E. (2008). Revisiting the affective Simon effect. Cognition and Emotion, 22(2), 193–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930701339228

Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

Linguistics

Journal Section

Research Article

Publication Date

June 21, 2022

Submission Date

April 15, 2022

Acceptance Date

June 20, 2022

Published in Issue

Year 2022 Number: 28

APA
Öztürk, A. (2022). Semantic access during Turkish and English visual word processing in translation students: A case of semantic Simon paradigm. RumeliDE Dil Ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, 28, 570-579. https://doi.org/10.29000/rumelide.1133923