Cross-linguistic Semantic Priming Effect for Korean-English Unbalanced Bilinguals

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to examine the conceptual systems for Korean-English unbalanced bilinguals. The main focus was to examine whether the conceptual systems of Korean and English words are shared or independent. A primed lexical decision task was used and two types of semantic priming were compared: within-language and cross-language. The pattern of priming was very different, which suggests that Korean and English conceptual systems are not the same for Korean-English unbalanced bilinguals. Instead, it seems that they are connected but independent systems.