In a new paper appearing in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Jeonghwa Cho (Michigan PhD 2024) demonstrates evidence for shared morphosyntactic representations across languages in multilinguals, but these representations are modulated by language dominance. One key innovation of this study is a focus on prefixes, unlike the majority of previous studies that focus on shared (or separate) aspects of argument structure across languages. Across four experiments, Jeonghwa finds that cognate prefixes between English and Spanish speed up reaction times in a lexical decision experiment to a degree that can be disentangled from both orthographic and semantic effects. But, this effect is asymmetrical: priming is observed from L1 to L2 but not from L2 to L1.
Read on for all the glorious details!
Cho, J. & Brennan, J.R. (2025). Prefix priming within and across languages in early and late bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
doi: 10.1017/S136672892400107X
Abstract:
In contrast to ample evidence for cross-linguistic priming of monomorphemic words, cross-linguistic representation of affixes is not well understood. The current study examines cross-linguistic prefix priming among early and late English-Spanish bilinguals, focusing on prefixes that have the same form and meaning in the two languages. We first confirm robust prefix priming among English monolingual speakers (Experiment 1). We also observe prefix priming from first-language English to second-language Spanish but only for early bilinguals (Experiment 2). On the other hand, both early and late bilinguals do not show reliable prefix priming effects that are dissociated from orthographic or semantic priming from Spanish to English (Experiment 3) or from Spanish to Spanish (Experiment 4). The results suggest that for early bilinguals, the tested prefixes in their L1 and L2 have shared representations. Less reliable results for late bilinguals may reflect their weaker sensitivity to morphological structure in a second language.