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Abstract The representation and organization of various languages in the mental lexicons of multilingual speakers has recently become a new focus of lexical processing studies. Among all possibilities, the masked translation priming asymmetry provided convincing experimental evidence for revealing this complicated issue. The present study, therefore, used a lexical decision task under the masked translation priming paradigm to explore the asymmetry between L1 and L2 languages with L2-dominant Uygur-Chinese-English trilingual users. The results showed that despite sharing a similar proficiency, L2 Chinese produced significant masked translation priming effects on L1 Uyghur. However, the masked translation priming effects produced by L1 Uyghur on L2 Chinese was barely significant. It was proposed that such a rare “reversed” masked translation priming asymmetry with multilingual speakers was possibly introduced by L2 dominance. Further discussions were made about the importance of language dominance in the masked translation priming asymmetry, and the possible explanations by major models in bilingual lexical processing.
Key words: masked translation priming asymmetry; L2 dominance; multilingual speakers
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