Onset and Time Course of Cognate and Repetition Priming in Spanish-English Bilinguals
Undergraduate: Jihane Jadi
Faculty Advisor: Peter Gordon
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience
The ability to use more than one language and the impact it may have on the brain has raised questions about how monolinguals differ from each other. Patterns of priming provide a way to assess the similarity of representations for language in the minds of monolingual and multilingual individuals and to determine the overlap of the lexicons for different languages in the minds of multilingual individuals. Researchers who have used priming to understand the connectivity of two languages in a bilingual have found that repetition priming is equivalent to cognate priming. Cognates are words that are identical semantically and similar phonologically and orthographically. The focus of this study is to determine the basis of repetition and cognate priming with the goals of determining if the two types of priming really have the same magnitude in addition to understanding how cognate pairs are processed and represented in the bilingual brain in comparison to repetition pairs. This research will contribute to understanding the structuring of the lexicons of a bilinguals two languages. Key Words: Priming, Cognate Pairs, Repetition Pairs, Lexicons