Cross-language priming: A view from bilingual speech

Abstract

In the current paper we report on a study of

Structural Priming, Levels of Awareness, and Agency in Contact-Induced Language Change

“…Indeed, consistent with the hypothesized link between contact-induced change and cross-linguistic priming, Fernández et al (2017) observed that Spanish-English bilinguals were more tolerant than monolinguals in their judgments of L1 language structures that contained innovations from their L2, and that these results could be linked to other results in this population of bilinguals, in which they observed priming of innovative language use across languages. Related results were found by Travis et al (2017; see also Torres Cacoullos and Travis 2010), who studied the production of first-person subject pronouns in a bilingual corpus of Spanish-English bilinguals from New Mexico, which are always produced in English but can either be dropped or overtly produced in Spanish. They found that the use of overt first-person subject use in Spanish was among other things influenced by whether it has been overtly used in a previous sentence, even when this previous sentence was English.…”

“…Although the vast majority of evidence on priming is based on experimental manipulations, it is also evident from observational studies that priming is an inherent property of natural language use that takes place ubiquitously in real life, both in monolingual discourse (e.g., Bresnan et al 2007;Weiner and Labov 1983), and in bilingual discourse (e.g., Fricke and Kootstra 2016;Travis et al 2017; see Gries and Kootstra 2017, for a review). Indeed, Scherre and Naro (1991) even go so far as to claim that priming, or 'formal parallelism' as they call it, "should be considered a serious candidate for a universal of language use and processing" (p. 30).…”

“…Because structural priming also occurs between languages, the idea of structural priming as a mechanism of language change can of course also take place between languages, potentially leading to contact-induced language change (cf., Fernández et al 2017;Loebell and Bock 2003;Kootstra and Doedens 2016;Kootstra and Muysken 2017;Kootstra andŞahin 2018;Travis et al 2017). Contact-induced language change can be defined here as (probabilistic) differences in linguistic preferences between speakers that have been frequently using another language as well, compared to speakers that have not (e.g., Dogruöz and Backus 2009;Indefrey et al 2017;Moro and Klamer 2015;Otheguy et al 2007;Villerius 2019).…”

Structural priming within and across languages: a corpus-based perspective

“…Indeed, the first corpus-based priming studies have now been done, and have been able to tackle some of the issues raised above. Most of this corpus-based research on cross-linguistic priming has been done by Torres Cacoullos, Travis, and colleagues (e.g., Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2011, 2013, 2016; Travis et al, 2017). They collected a big corpus of natural speech from New Mexican bilinguals, consisting of about 29 hours of speech from 41 bilinguals with varying ages (the NMSEB corpus; Torres Cacoullos & Travis, in preparation).…”

“…Corpus-based research is needed to validate these results with evidence from spontaneous language use. A welcome development in this case is that the availability of large-scale bilingual corpora is growing, which makes it increasingly easy to perform quantitative analyses of priming on the basis of spontaneous bilingual language use (see e.g., Fricke & Kootstra, 2016; Myslín & Levy, 2015; Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2013, 2016; Travis, Torres Cacoullos & Kidd, 2017, which will be discussed in Section 4 of this paper). A second reason is that most corpus-based research on bilingual language production has focused on the level of the single sentence / utterance (e.g., Broersma & de Bot, 2006; Carter, Deuchar, Davies & Parafita Couto, 2011; Poplack, 1980; Poplack, Zentz & Dion, 2012), and not so much on dependencies between utterances in the form of priming.…”