Zhiyi Wu
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Graduate Student, Second Language Acquisition
Academic Advisor/Graduate Assistant, College of Arts and Humanities
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
zhiyiw1@umd.edu
1120 Francis Scott Key Hall
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Research Expertise
Psycholinguistics
Second Language Processing
Zhiyi Wu joined the Second Language Acquisition Ph.D. program in Spring 2021. Her current research interests include the learning and processing of second language phonology, lexical units, and morphosyntax, from both psycholinguistic and the neurolinguistic perspectives. She received her Master’s degree in Applied Second Language Acquisition from Carnegie Mellon University in 2018.
Publications
From lab to web: Replicating cross-language translation priming asymmetry in an online environment
Cross-language translation priming, Online experimentation, Second language psycholinguistics, Lexical decision task, Reaction time
Author/Lead: Zhiyi Wu, Mireia Toda CosiIn second language (L2) acquisition research, understanding how learners process words across languages is crucial, with the translation priming paradigm consistently revealing that an L2 word can be processed significantly faster after a brief presentation of its translation equivalent in one’s first language (L1) but not vice versa. This study attempted to replicate Chen et al.’s (2014) investigation of translation priming asymmetry with Chinese-English bilinguals in an online environment using the Naodao crowdsourcing platform. We conducted three masked priming lexical decision experiments: two testing L1-to-L2 and L2-to-L1 priming with a 50-ms prime duration, and one examining L2-to-L1 priming with an extended 250-ms prime duration. Results showed that the classic asymmetry pattern was not fully reproducible in this online setting at 50-ms prime duration, with null effects in both directions. However, significant priming effects emerged with the extended prime presentation in the L2-to-L1 direction. These findings suggest that online implementation of timing-sensitive paradigms may require methodological adaptations.