How are Words Connected in Our Minds? Priming

What connections do we make when we encounter language? How long does it take us to spot these ties? In this week's episode, we talk about priming: what it is, how far those connections go, and why our minds aren't exploding with the complexity of the web we drag through our sentences all the time. This is Topic #45! This week's tag language: Bengali! Other psycholinguistics videos: Phonological Illusions: ****** Pathways in the Brain: ****** Find us on all the the social media worlds: Tumblr: ****** Twitter: ****** Facebook: ****** And at our website, ****** ! Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at ****** We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally. Sources: The French/English coin/money study: Beauvillain, C. and J. Grainger. 1987. Accessing interlexical homographs: Some limitations of a language-selective access. Journal of Memory and Language 26: 658-672. Cross-linguistic priming of cat with chien: Kroll, J. F. and G. Sunderman. 2003. Cognitive processes in second language learners and bilinguals: The development of lexical and conceptual representations. In C. Doughty and M. Long (eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, 104-129. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Cross-modal priming study: Swinney, D. A. 1979. Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 18, 645-59. Masked priming studies: Carr, T.H. and D. Dagenbach. 1990. Semantic priming and repetition priming from masked words: Evidence for a center-surround attentional mechanism in perceptual recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 16 (2): 341-350. Davis, C.J. 2003. Factors underlying masked priming effects in competitive network models of visual word recognition. In S. Kinoshita and S. J. Lupker (eds), Masked Priming: The State of the Art, 121-170. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. Forster, K. L., and C. Davis. 1984. Repetition priming and frequency attenuation in lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 10: 680-698. There's also a very good discussion of priming and how it works in Eva Fernandez and Helen Smith Cairns's textbook, Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics, Chapter 6. Looking forward to next week! ...