Lab Affiliation: the Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities

Research Interests:

I am interested in within and cross-language semantic conceptual representation and in the interplay between executive control, bilingualism and second language learning. In recent and ongoing projects my students and I are examining factors influencing translation choice in behavioral tasks and in large language corpora; the implications of grammatical class for meaning representation and bilingual performance; the detailed nature of executive control advantages accrued by bilinguals, with specific emphasis on cognitive flexibility; and how individual differences in executive control and cognitive flexibility might further our understanding of the variability in second language learning outcomes.

Recent Publications:

Degani, T., Prior, A. & Tokowicz, N. (in press). Bidirectional Transfer: The Effect of Sharing a Translation. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology.

Prior, A., Wintner, S., MacWhinney, B. & Lavie, A. (in press). Translation ambiguity in and out of context. Applied Psycholinguistics.

Prior, A. & MacWhinney, B. (in press). A bilingual advantage in task switching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

Degani, T., Prior, A. & Tokowicz, N. (May, 2007). How sharing a translation affects semantic similarity: Reciprocal effects in L1 and L2. Talk accepted for presentation at the 6th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Hamburg, Germany.

Prior, A., MacWhinney, B. & Kroll, J.F. (2007). Translation norms for English and Spanish: The role of lexical variables, word class and L2 proficiency in negotiating translation ambiguity. Behavior Research Methods, 39,1029-1038.

Prior, A. & Bentin, S. (2008). Word associations are formed incidentally during sentential semantic integration. Acta Psychologica, 127, 57-71..

Prior, A. & Bentin, S. (2006). Differential integration efforts of mandatory and optional sentence constituents. Psychophysiology, 43, 440-449.

Prior, A. & Bentin, S. (2003). Incidental formation of episodic associations: The importance of sentential context. Memory and Cognition, 31, 306-316.

Prior, A. & Geffet, M. (2003). Mutual information and semantic similarity as predictors of word association strength: Modulation by association type and semantic relation. In F. Schmalhofer, R. Young & G. Katz (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st European Cognitive Science Conference. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Tokowicz, N., Prior, A. & Kroll, J.F. (in progress). The role of translation ambiguity and semantic similarity in translation production.