1994 Volume 65 Issue 2 Pages 121-129
Twenty undergraduates were required to translate English words into Japanese (Experiment 1) and Japanese words into English (Experiment 2), ignoring distracting pictures. Previous studies suggested that pictorial information have direct access to its conceptual node. If the process of translating words proceeds via concept which is common to two languages, it is expected that interference or facilitation from pictures is observed in subjects' translation process. The results showed the interference from pictures in translating both English and Japanese words, but the amount of interference was not influenced by the semantic relatedness between words and pictures. The lack of influence of semantic relatedness suggested that translating process did not proceed via concept. The result of the present study was discussed in terms of word association hypothesis and concept mediation hypothesis.
