New Paper: The Interaction between the two Languages of Bilingual Speakers

This priming study was led by Dr Eva Poort, looking at how very recent experience with words (including cognates and interlingual homographs) in the L2 of Dutch-English bilinguals influenced their processing of related words in their L1.

Poort, E. D, & Rodd, J. M. (2022). Cross-lingual priming of cognates and interlingual homographs from L2 to L1. Glossa Psycholinguistics, 1(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/G601147

This work follows up earlier work by Eva on this topic:

Poort, E.D., Rodd, J.M. (2019). Towards a distributed connectionist account of cognates and interlingual homographs: evidence from semantic relatedness tasks. PeerJ. 7:e6725 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6725

Poort, E. D., & Rodd, J. M. (2017). The cognate facilitation effect in bilingual lexical decision is influenced by stimulus list composition. Acta Psychologica, 180, 52-63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.08.008

Poort, E. D., Warren, J. E.,& Rodd, J. M. (2016). Recent experience with cognates and interlingual homographs in one language affects subsequent processing in another language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19 (1), 206-212.

New Paper: Word-meaning priming extends beyond homonyms

This paper, which was led by Adam Curtis (Univeristy of York) as part of an ESRC grant awarded to Prof Gareth Gaskell (York) and Prof Jenni Rodd (UCL) has been published in Cognition and can be accessed here.

In three pre-registered experiments, participants were exposed to non-homonym targets (e.g., “balloon”) in sentences that biased interpretation towards a specific aspect of the word’s meaning (e.g., balloon‑helium vs. balloon-float). After a ~ 10–30 min delay access to the primed aspect of the word’s meaning was enhanced.

These findings show that similar ‘word-meaning priming’ effects, that had previously only been shown for homonyms (e.g., bark-dog vs bark-tree) are far more general than previously thought, and sugest that episodic sentence memory plays a key role in comprehension.