DETERMINANTS OF WORD TRANSLATION

Three experiments looked for the determinants of performance in 3 versions of the word-translation task. Experiment 1 contained the normal-translation version and the cued-translation version. In Experiment 2 Ss performed the translation-recognition task. In both experiments word frequency and word imageability were manipulated. Both affected performance in all 3 versions of the task. In Experiment 3 (normal translation), in addition to the effects of frequency and imageability, those of context availability, cognate status, definition accuracy, length of the stimulus words and of their translations, and familiarity were studied. All of them correlated with the performance measures, but only 4 variables accounted for unique translation variance: the frequency of the stimulus word, the frequency of the response word, cognate status, and context availability. These results are discussed in terms of bilingual memory structure.