PIRE undergraduate fellow Erika Exton presented at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society.
Numerous studies on semantic memory observed that monolinguals are faster and more accurate in processing concrete than abstract words. However, many aspects about bilingual semantic processing and lexical-semantic memory are not yet fully understood, including concreteness effects in second language (L2) processing. This study, as part of a larger project on the neurocognitive correlates of semantic processing in younger and older monolinguals, bilinguals, and individuals with aphasia, examined concreteness effects in lexical decision and semantic relationship judgment tasks in the second language in Dutch-English bilinguals. Concreteness effects in L2 lexical decision were small and depended on second language proficiency. Robust concreteness effects were found in the L2 semantic relationship judgment task; moreover, for abstract, but not for concrete words, performance was better for associative pairings than for similarity pairings. Implications for lexical-semantic activation during L2 concrete and abstract word processing and bilingual semantic memory will be discussed.