| dc.description.abstract | This study aims to investigate the effects of inhibitory neighbourhood priming on sentence reading and its relationship with the reading skills of Norwegian-English bilinguals reading in their second language. We aimed to investigate if the findings from previous studies (Frisson et al., 2014b; Pélissier et al., 2022) can be replicable when individual differences are considered. Previous research found that inhibitory priming effects disappear as the distance between the prime and target increases, skilled monolingual readers do not get inhibitory priming when a full stop separates the prime and target, and that proficient readers exhibit inhibition priming longer than less skilled readers.
In the experiment, we recorded the eye movements of bilingual participants as they read a single sentence on a screen, and gathered data on participants’ individual differences by performing additional tasks measuring their inhibition, working memory and proficiency skills. We investigated the effects of distance (short vs. long) between the prime and target (e.g. train-trail) and sentence structure, where the prime and target were either within the same sentence or in two different sentences, and related this to individual differences.
The results showed that individuals with high proficiency and inhibitory skills exhibit less inhibition in short-distance conditions. We also observed interesting effects on working memory that were conditioned by a sentence break in short-distance conditions. Higher working memory skills facilitated the recognition of the target word when prime and target were in different sentences. Additionally, those with low inhibition skills exhibited inhibition priming on the spillover region when there was an interaction between inhibition skills and a full stop. We observed some effects with sentence breaks regardless of the individual differences. | |
