Abstract In adult bilinguals, a word in one language will activate a related word in the other language, with language dominance modulating the direction of these effects. To determine whether the early bilingual lexicon possesses similar properties to its adult counterpart, two experiments compared translation equivalent priming and cross-linguistic semantic priming in 27-month-old bilingual toddlers learning English and one other language. Priming effects were found in both experiments, irrespective of language dominance and distance between the child’s two languages. The time course of target word recognition revealed a similar pattern for translation equivalent priming and cross-language semantic priming. These results suggest that the early bilingual lexicon possesses properties similar to the adult one in terms of word to concept connections. However, the absence of an advantage of translation equivalent priming over semantic priming, and the lack of dominance and language distance effects, suggest that when two languages are acquired in parallel during infancy, their integration within a single dynamic system is highly robust to input variations.

中文翻译：

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双语幼儿的翻译等价和跨语言语义启动

摘要 在成人双语者中，一种语言的一个词会激活另一种语言中的一个相关词，语言优势调节这些影响的方向。为了确定早期双语词典是否具有与其成人对应物相似的特性，两个实验比较了 27 个月大的双语幼儿学习英语和另一种语言的翻译等效启动和跨语言语义启动。在两个实验中都发现了启动效应，而不管孩子的两种语言之间的语言优势和距离如何。目标词识别的时间进程揭示了翻译等效启动和跨语言语义启动的相似模式。这些结果表明，早期的双语词典在词到概念的联系方面具有与成人词典相似的特性。