Structural priming as a model for testing language change in bilingualism

What is it about?

Bilingual speakers' languages often influence one another, especially when used in the same community. In this study, we investigated whether contact between Spanish and Catalan leads to measurable changes in how bilinguals process sentences. By testing how these speakers responded to both grammatical and ungrammatical structures, we found that individual language experience plays a key role in how they process grammar, both in the moment and over time. Furthermore, our findings support previous theories suggesting that brain’s reaction to unexpected linguistic input is a crucial factor for building accurate, experience-sensitive models of bilingualism.

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Photo by Ling App on Unsplash

Photo by Ling App on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Unlike traditional studies that often treat bilingual speakers as a homogenous group, our work highlights how individual language history drives real-time grammatical shifts. By demonstrating that structural priming during sentence reading can model these changes, we provide additional evidence for the role of implicit learning in language contact. Crucially, we implement an experimental paradigm that is easily adaptable to EEG studies, providing a scalable tool for researchers to capture the neurocognitive dynamics of how bilingual brains syntactically adapt during structural priming.

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