Abstract

Some concepts have direct translation equivalents but most can only be partially translated, and some cannot be translated word for word and require less codable, periphrastic means to convey the same meaning in the other language (De Groot, 2000; Kemmerer, 2019). How does the bilingual mind represent language-specific concepts? One way to investigate this question is to vary the language context of operation and then trace observable sings of conceptual transfer, both forward (L1 to L2) and reverse (L2 to L1). Here I synthesize recent findings from two conceptual domains, namely event endpoints (related to grammatical aspect) and event frames (related to path/manner encoding). Findings from cognitive categorization tasks are in line with previous studies showing effects of language experimental context (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2017; Emmorey, 2019; Kersten et al., 2010; Lai et al., 2013), but qualify these findings in an important way. While cognitive categorisation can appear to be language-selective, as indexed by effects of language context and verbal interference, the overall categorisation patterns do not resemble those of monolinguals of either language, showing evidence in favour of partial integration of language-specific conceptual representations.