Prompting cognates in the bilingual lexicon

Abstract

When psycholinguists study the bilingual lexicon, they use priming procedures in their investigations. This paper proposes an application of priming to develop a prompting-based means of optimizing access to the bilingual lexicon during translation, applying what we know about priming for the specific purpose of supporting the translator. The function of prompting would be to help translators find “shortcuts” to the target language words they are seeking. The concepts of priming and prompting presented in the first section of the paper are put to the test in two experiments that form the content of the second section. They provide empirical evidence that, indeed, prompting has a facilitative effect during the online translation of single word false cognates and noncognates.