Age of Acquisition Effects in Translation Judgment -Analysis

Ellis, A.W., & Izura, C. (2004). Age of acquisition effects in translation judgment tasks. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 165-181

Introduction

It is quite an amazing phenomenon the way that bilinguals posses the ability to translate semantic meanings back and fort between two different languages with seemingly no effort at all. In studies conducted by de Groot, it was found that translation is faster from L2 to L1 when there is a larger discrepancy in language dominance between the participants' L1 and L2. (de Groot & Comijs, 1995; Van Hell & de Groot, 1998) A.W. Ellis and C. Izura, found this study interesting and decided to examine what mechanisms help facilitate and even strengthen the semantic word recognition performance of bilinguals. The main question the experimenters were trying to answer was whether or not the speed of bilingual translation recognition correlated with the age of acquisition (AoA) of both languages (L1 and L2). When examining previous studies, Ellis and Izura found that there was very little research done on age of acquisition, which spurned them to include it in their study so as to discover the effect it has on bilingual translation. Their hypothesis in this study was that translation would be the most rapid when the target words in the different languages have similar semantic representation, which was also hypothesized to be influenced by the age of acquisition in both languages.

Methods

This experiment used 20 participants, 10 male and 10 female, and all were studying at the University of York in England at the time of the study. The participants had a mean age of 28, and were bilinguals, knowing both Spanish and English (which was the L2 and had a mean AoA of 12. There were 64 'translation equivalent' word pairs (one English, one Spanish), which were presented to the participants simultaneously. The participants were then tasked with deciding whether or not the words had the same meaning as quickly as possible. Reaction times were then recorded and processed. The experiment began with a fixation point on the screen for 1000ms, followed by a word pair. Once the participant gave an answer, there was a pause of 500ms, followed by the fixation dot again. This repeated for 4 blocks, with each block containing 30 trials.

Discussion

By looking at the results, we can see that age of language acquisition does play a significant role in bilingual word processing and translation. As we can see from the numbers, when presented with L2 words that learned early on in language acquisition, semantic word recognition was quicker, about 30 ms to be exact, than words that were learned later on in L2 language acquisition. Overall, these findings support the original hypothesis of the authors, stating that there would be a significant effect of L1 and L2 age of acquisition on translation. This makes sense being that words acquired early on I language learning usually have concrete meanings, whereas those learned later typically are abstract concepts and are not used as often in day to day language, which provides logical evidence as to the decrease in recognition and processing speed of such words. When comparing these to the findings of de Groot, a comparison can be found, as well as additional evidence supporting the claim that bilinguals with similar L1 and L2 mastery have greater ease in translation and semantic processing between the two languages. This article has been cited at least 69 times on Google Scholar, showing that it is a respected and informative study, giving credit to the findings, which can apparently be applied in multiple situations when trying to understand the translation and processing tendencies of bilinguals.

References     

de Groot, A. M. B., & Comijs, H. (1995). Translation recognition and translation production: Comparing a new and an old tool in the study of bilingualism. Language Learning, 45, 467-509.

de Groot, A. M. B., Dannenburg, L., & Van Hell, J. G. (1994). Forward and backward word translation by bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 600-629.

Ellis, A.W., & Izura, C. (2004). Age of acquisition effects in translation judgment tasks. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 165-181