It is often observed that people tend to match each others body movements, speech style, and patterns of language use during conversation (Giles Coupland and Coupland, 1991). Recently, it has been proposed that ‘structural priming’ should be added to this list (Pickering and Ferreira, 2008). Structural priming occurs when processing of a linguistic structure is facilitated by prior exposure to ...

Linguistic adaptation is a phenomenon where language representations change in response to linguistic input. Adaptation can occur on multiple linguistic levels such as phonology (tuning of phonotactic constraints), words (repetition priming), and syntax (structural priming). The persistent nature of these adaptations suggests that they may be a form of implicit learning and connectionist models...

Three experiments are reported that focus on the grammatical and associative relationship between a single word context and a to-be-named target in the SerboCroatian language. Unlike studies using the English language, word class need not be violated in order to obtain grammatical incongruency: all word pairs, therefore, can be semantically plausible. Experiment 1 contrasted naming with lexical...

The perception of Swedish phonaesthemes and their psychological reality is studied in priming and lexical decision experiments. Abelin (1999) described phonaesthemes such as: bl‘light, vision’ in words like ‘blänka, blixtra’ and fl’movement’ in words like ‘fladdra, flaxa’. Bergen (2004) studied phonaesthemes like: gl‘light, vision’ in words like ‘glimmer, glisten’ and sn‘nose, mouth’ as in ‘sno...

In various priming paradigms, segmental overlap (i.e. phonological or orthographical overlap) between the target and prime word has been demonstrated to facilitate picture naming. But features extending over several segments are rarely controlled for in stimulus selection. Some attention has been paid to such suprasegmental features, but inconsistent findings have been obtained. The presented s...

This paper presents a simple model of linguistic priming between languages in contact, based on the utterance selection model (USM) for language change of Baxter et al. (2006). It will be shown that the emergence or the non-emergence of a new contact language depends on the way potentially bilingual agents choose a language to communicate.

This is the first attempt of empirical investigation of language mediated concept activation (LMCA) in bilingual memory as a cognitive mechanism facilitating divergent thinking. Russian-English bilingual and Russian monolingual college students were tested on a battery of tests including among others Abbreviated Torrance Tests for Adults assessing divergent thinking traits and translingual prim...

Speakers must choose between different alternative sentence structures in speaking. Studies in English (Bock & Loebell, 1990; Pickering & Branigan, 1998) have shown that this choice can be explained by representations which make use of SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES (e.g. NP-PP , NP-NP, etc.). The equivalent structural choices in Japanese are made up of the same syntactic category (i.e. NP). Using a tech...

Along with using geometric information to define spatial terms such as “in”, Coventry and Garrod (2004) have proposed the use of dynamic-kinematic (DK) routines which relate to how two objects interact (kinematic) over time (dynamic). For the spatial description, “The penny is in the bowl,” the penny is contained by a bounding box around the bowl as well as the DK location-control routine that ...

During the last two decades, bilingual research has adopted the masked translation priming paradigm as a tool to investigate the architecture of the bilingual language system. Although there is now a consensus about the existence of forward translation priming (from native language primes [L1] to second language [L2] translation equivalent targets), the backward translation priming effect (from...