The development of bilingual memory: Evidence from word translation by trilinguals

We investigated the relation between foreign-language proficiency and multilingual lexicosemantic organization, using two sets of 48 unbalanced Dutch-English-French trilingual adults as participants. Dutch was the participants' native language. Of their two foreign languages English was the strongest. We tested a developmental hypothesis that assumes a ''word-association'' lexical structure for the native language and a relatively weak foreign language, here French, but a ''concept-mediation'' structure for the native language and a stronger foreign language, here English. Support for the hypothesis derived from the participants' performance in two versions of the word-translation task: ''translation production'' and ''translation recognition''. Translation was from Dutch to both of the foreign languages. The critical experimental manipulation was word concreteness. We hypothesized that a concept-mediation structure would predict an effect of this manipulation, whereas a word-association organization would not. In accordance with the developmental hypothesis, a clear concreteness effect obtained in Dutch to English translation, but not in Dutch to French translation. Overall, the data suggest that foreign-language proficiency indeed determines multilingual lexicosemantic organization.