Naslov
Cross-language priming: Evidence from Croatian-English bilinguals with different second language proficiency levels

Autori
Bogunović, Irena

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Ocjenski radovi, doktorska disertacija

Fakultet
Interdisciplinarni doktorski studij Jezik i kognitivna neuroznanost

Mjesto
Zagreb

Datum
28.04

Godina
2017

Stranica
143

Mentor
Brala Vukanović, Marija

Neposredni voditelj
Geld, Renata

Ključne riječi
lexical access, bilingualism, Croatian, English, priming effect

Sažetak
As a lingua franca, English dominates the language of the media, technology, science, and many other aspects of modern lifestyle. In Croatia, daily exposure to English is measured in hours per day. English words have become a part of Croatian everyday communication, but unlike anglicisms, they have not adapted to its rules. This provides a unique opportunity to explore the role of L2 proficiency and language use in bilingual lexical access. The main goal of this study is to investigate cross-language priming effect in unbalanced Croatian-English bilinguals with different levels of L2 proficiency. The investigation consisted of three pilot studies and a main study. The main study was divided into two parts: the first included a proficiency test and a questionnaire on language use, and the second part consisted of three cross-language priming experiments combined with a lexical decision task. The first experiment explored priming effect in both language directions, and in two conditions: associative/semantic relatedness and translation equivalence. The other two experiments focused on different language directions with unadapted English words as L2 words. A total of 498 participants took part in the pilot studies, while 93 participants were engaged in the main study. The results showed that the participants responded significantly faster when primes and targets were related. In Experiment 1, L1-L2 direction exhibited shorter reaction time compared to L2-L1. Proficiency was significant only in the case of unadapted English words. These findings suggest that bilinguals with different levels of L2 proficiency can directly access conceptual representations of L2 words, and that the speed with which L2 words are accessed is related to L2 vocabulary knowledge and subjective word frequencies. This implies that words that are used more frequently are accessed faster, regardless of the language they belong to, which supports the assumption about the non-selective lexical access, even in unbalanced bilinguals.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

POVEZANOST RADA