Lecture
Cross-linguistic priming in bilingual adults and children
- Gerrit Jan Kootstra
- Date
- Thursday 17 May 2018
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 307
It is evident from many studies that bilingual language production and comprehension is influenced by cross-language interactions, such as code-switching and syntactic transfer. These cross-language interactions can be caused by multiple forms of linguistic experience, not only ‘long-term’ experience like a bilingual’s experience with both languages in daily life, but also ‘short-term’ experience like interactive alignment in dialogue and structural priming across languages (i.e., the tendency to re-use recently processed words and syntactic structures across languages). In this talk, I will present mostly experimental but also corpus-based research on how such different sources of linguistic experience influence bilingual language use. In doing so, I focus on both code-switched and non-code-switched language use, arguing that the same mechanisms apply in both modes of speech. Although most of the data I present is based on bilingual adults, I will also discuss recent research on how to investigate these issues in bilingual children.