TRANSFER BETWEEN PICTURE NAMING AND TRANSLATION - A TEST OF ASYMMETRIES IN BILINGUAL MEMORY

A transfer paradigm was used to investigate the relationship between picture naming and translation. English-Spanish bilinguals first named pictures and subsequently translated words in both their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Some words in the translation task were repetitions of concepts that had previously been named as pictures. Whereas picture naming produced reliable transfer to translation from L1 to L2, it produced no transfer to translation from L2 to L1. The results support the claim that connections in bilingual memory are asymmetric: Translation is conceptually mediated from L1 to L2 but lexically mediated from L2 to L1.