Lecturer, Department of Learning Disabilities
Phone: 04-8249357, 04-8249357, Extension: 3357
Email: aprior@construct.haifa.ac.il
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. (2010). A bilingual advantage in task switching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 253-262.
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.
