This presentation addresses unconscious perceptions of morphological similarity, with the main focus on the applicability of priming methodology as a tool for the research purposes on the bases of the participants’ reflections. The results will be discussed in terms of the design and the content of the task.
The earliest stages of comprehending and acquiring a new language are often characterized by the detection of familiar items or features in the formerly unknown language. Language users’ conscious and unconscious perceptions of cross-linguistic similarity are an underlying factor throughout their target language development. This presentation addresses unconscious perceptions of morphological similarity, with the main focus on the applicability of priming methodology. Past priming research (cf. Jiang 2012; Author, Jarvis 2019) has shown that participants’ latencies are affected by the degree of similarity between the prime and the target, and that participants respond more quickly after related primes than after unrelated primes. For this reason priming methodology was applied to measure participants’ unconscious perceptions of similarity between morphological forms in two related languages, Estonian and Finnish. Participants’ perceptions were measured through their latencies on a lexical decision task involving cross-linguistic primes. The test words include Estonian and Finnish words that are more or less similar in form and morphological function. The data consists of the participants’ reflections on the pilot lexical decision task, gathered after conducting the task by the 23 Finnish participants, ages 18-35, all university students with various majors and having no previous knowledge of or exposure to Estonian. The results will be discussed in terms of the design and the content of the task: instruction, training task, prime and target stimuli. References Author, Jarvis, S. 2019. Unconscious perceiving of cross-linguistic similarity in inflectional morphology. – EUROSLA 29. 29th Conference of European Second Language Acquisition. Book of abstracts. Lund: University of Lund, 166. Jiang, N. 2012. Conducting Reaction Time Research in Second Language Studies. Second Language Acquisition Research Series. New York and London: Routledge.
