Linguistics PhD candidate Jeonghwa Cho gave a talk at the University of Cambridge as part of the Cambridge Processing and Acquisition of Language Lab (CamPAL group talks) series on Monday, November 22, at 11:30 am-12:45 pm EST. Her talk is titled "Grammatical Morpheme Priming in Visual Word Recognition: Across and Within Languages."
ABSTRACT
It is well established that primes that are lexically identical to targets facilitate the word recognition process both within the same language and across different languages (e.g. Chen and Ng, 1989; Rastle, Davis, Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 2000). Moreover, syntactic structure has been shown to prime between languages, such that an exposure to a certain construction in one language significantly increases the probability of using the same structure in another language (e.g. Hartsuiker et al., 2004). It remains to be answered, however, whether grammatical morphemes also show priming effects in visual word recognition. In this talk, I will present results from a cross-linguistic priming study that investigated the priming effect of L1 (Korean) case feature on L2 (English). In specific, Korean words that are marked for case were used as prime words for English accusative words presented in a sentential context. I will then conclude the talk by discussing follow-up studies on within-language priming of grammatical morphemes, specifically the past tense morpheme in English, and future directions.
