A new methodological approach to understanding the mental representation of concepts and words that represent them in the first language of bilinguals was investigated. Spanish-English bilinguals were asked to rate Spanish words on one of three dimensions: concreteness, imageability, or context-availability. Three categories of words were investigated: concrete, abstract, and emotion. Findings paralleled those reportedby Altarriba, Bauer, and Benvenuto(1999) for English wordtypes as rated by English speakers except for one dimension. While emotion words were rated as less concrete but more easily pictured than abstract words, bilinguals provided equal ratings for both word types in terms of context-availability. These findings suggest two important points: (1) concrete, abstract, and emotion words are represented in similar ways across languages in terms of concreteness and imageability; and(2) emotion words in Spanish, for Spanish-English bilinguals are more readily contextualized to a specific episode than the corresponding words in English, for English speakers. The results suggest both a need to develop models of bilingual memory that account for wordtype differences, and the need to incorporate the idea of autobiographical memory in discussing the representation of cross-language emotion words.
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