Anat Prior, Ph.D.

Contact:
254P Baker Hall
Department of Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA
Phone: (412) 268-5256
Fax: (412) 268-3905
email: aprior@andrew.cmu.edu

CV

Family Pictures

Research Interests

I am a post-doctoral research associate working with Prof. Brian MacWhinney and Prof. Judy Kroll from Penn State University. The focus of my work is bilingual conceptual representation. Specifically, I am interested in the consequences word class and multiple translation mappings might have for semantic representations, and the degree to which they are shared by the two langauges of a bilingual speaker. I have developed a large set of translation norms between English and Spanish, including hundreds of nouns, verbs and class ambiguous words. I am currently examining the online processing of these materials in translation production and translation recognition, and finding significant effects of word class and translation ambiguity. In the next phase of my work, I will look at how supporting sentential context might influence processing of ambiguous words. I am also collaborating with Prof. Natasha Tokowicz from the University of Pittsburgh on similar issues in Dutch-English translation performance.

Education

• 2000-2004: PhD in Cognitive Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Awarded March, 2005. Thesis title: "Exploring the nature of associations: Semantic factors in the formation of word associations". You can read more about this research here.

• 1998-1999: MA Cum Laude in Neuropsychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• 1995-1997: BA Summa Cum Laude in Psychology and an Interdisciplinary Honors Program in the Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Selected Publications and Presentations

• Prior, A., MacWhinney, B. & Kroll, J.F. (submitted). Translation norms for English and Spanish: The role of lexical variables, word class and L2 proficiency in negotiating translation ambiguity.

• Prior, A., Kroll, J.F. & MacWhinney, B. (May, 2007). The impact of translation ambiguity and word class on bilingual performance. Talk accepted for presentation at the 6th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Hamburg, Germany.

• 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. & Bentin, S. (in press). Word associations are formed incidentally during sentential semantic integration. Acta Psychologica.

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

• Prior, A., Kroll, J.F. & MacWhinney, B. (November, 2006). The role of translation ambiguity and word class in two translation tasks. Poster presented at the 47th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Houston, TX.

• Prior, A., MacWhinney, B. & Kroll, J.F. (October, 2006). Does "querer" translate as "to love" or "to want"? Effects of lexical properties and bilingual experience in negotiating translation ambiguity. Poster presented at the Fifth International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Montreal, Canada.

• 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.