Can a Horse Be a Donkey? Semantic and Form Interference Effects in Translation Recognition in Early and Late Proficient and Nonproficient Spanish‐Catalan Bilinguals

The present study investigates the developmental aspect of the revised hierarchical model ( Kroll & Stewart, 1994 ) concerning the access to the conceptual store from the second language (L2). We manipulated the level of proficiency and age of L2 acquisition. We tested Spanish‐Catalan bilinguals (49 early proficient bilinguals, 28 late proficient bilinguals, and 28 late nonproficient bilinguals) in a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. The second word of the pair could be the true translation, a word related in form, a word more or less related in meaning, or an unrelated word. The results showed that both early and late proficient bilinguals were more sensitive to the semantic than to the form manipulation, but only in the case of words with a very close meaning. On the contrary, the late nonproficient group exhibited larger effects of the form than of the semantic manipulation.