A PSYCHOPHYSICAL INVESTIGATION OF LANGUAGE PRIMING EFFECTS IN 2 ENGLISH FRENCH BILINGUALS

This paper attempts to apply psychophysical methodology, usually reserved for the study of low-level perceptual processes, to the study of language priming effects in bilingual subjects. Previous research using more traditional psycholinguistic techniques has demonstrated that bilinguals find words in one language harder to recognise when immediately preceded by a word of their own language. In the present experiments, this result was shown to remain robust even after the subjects had become very familiar with the experimental stimuli, thus suggesting that it is a highly automatised, irrepressible effect. The basic language priming effect was shown to be dependent on the neighbourhood characteristics (number of orthographically similar words in each language) of the prime words, but mainly at short prime exposures (<60 msec). At longer durations (428 msec), only the language of the prime (English or French) played a role.