Priming and persistence in bilinguals: What codeswitching tells us about lexical priming in sentential contexts

Most studies on lexical priming have examined single words presented in isolation, despite language users rarely encountering words in such cases. The present study builds upon this by examining both within-language identity priming and across-language translation priming in sentential contexts. Hig...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bilingualism (Cambridge, England) England), 2021-08, Vol.24 (4), p.681-693
Main Authors: Johns, Michael A., Rodrigo, Laura, Guzzardo Tamargo, Rosa E., Winneg, Aliza, Dussias, Paola E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bilingualism
Code switching
English language
Language
Lexical access
Linguistic identity
Linguistics
Meta Analysis
Monolingualism
Multilingualism
Persistence
Phonology
Priming
Questions
Repetition
Semantics
Semiotics
Semitic Languages
Sentences
Spanish language
Spontaneous speech
Stimuli
Translation
Word Recognition
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Most studies on lexical priming have examined single words presented in isolation, despite language users rarely encountering words in such cases. The present study builds upon this by examining both within-language identity priming and across-language translation priming in sentential contexts. Highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals read sentence-question pairs, where the sentence contained the prime and the question contained the target. At earlier stages of processing, we find evidence only of within-language identity priming; at later stages of processing, however, across-language translation priming surfaces, and becomes as strong as within-language identity priming. Increasing the time between the prime sentence and target question results in strengthened priming at the latest stages of processing. These results replicate previous findings at the single-word level but do so within sentential contexts, which has implications both for accounts of priming via automatic spreading activation as well as for accounts of persistence attested in spontaneous speech corpora.
ISSN:1366-7289
1469-1841
DOI:10.1017/S1366728921000080