engleski

Cognitive processing of unadapted English words in Croatian: Evidence from Croatian speakers of English with different levels of L2 proficiency

This study aims to investigate priming effect in L2 speakers with different levels of language proficiency. The study consisted of a questionnaire on language use, a proficiency test, and three priming experiments. Experiment 1 explored priming effect in both language directions and two conditions (associative and semantic relatedness ; translation equivalence). The other two experiments focused on different language directions with unadapted English words. The results showed that reaction times were shorter when primes and targets were related. In Experiment 1, the participants responded faster in L1-L2 direction. The effect of proficiency was observed in Experiments 2 and 3. These findings imply that L2 speakers have direct access to conceptual representations of L2 words, regardless of their proficiency level. The speed with which L2 words are accessed is related to vocabulary knowledge and subjective word frequencies, suggesting that frequency of use, rather than language membership, affects bilingual lexical access, even in low-proficiency L2 speakers.

priming effect, unadapted words, lexical access, bilingualism

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