Structural Priming, Levels of Awareness, and Agency in Contact-Induced Language Change

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper brings a lot of different literature together to propose an exciting program of research on how priming relates to levels of awareness in individuals, and how this in turn contributes to language change, especially in contact situations. As a reader, I found the paper compelling, but densely written and difficult to follow in parts. Below are some suggestions for helping the reader understand what the paper is proposing.

Lines 196-209: I would recommend elaborating a bit on the discussion of Campbell-Kibler and Babel. I’m not clear on how exactly they differ from Labov and Trudgill. Maybe some additional examples would help.

Lines 270-281: In this paragraph, it would help to give an example or two illustrating the communicative function of priming, so that readers can better understand it.

Lines 453-457: Please elaborate on how we can measure the relation between surprisal effects and conscious processing.

Line 464: Remind the reader what Van Coetsem’s stability gradient claimed about the distributed aspects of language structure and how exactly the gradient should be extended to accommodate these psycholinguistic findings.

Lines 523-535: Items 1-5 could use some further elaboration and unpacking. In addition, in the discussion on pp. 12, it would also be helpful to link each suggested research plan explicitly with one or more of the items in 1-5.

Line 555: You suggest: “it would be interesting to investigate this in a language contact situation, to explore how the interface between lexical and structural aspects of priming influence long-term priming between languages.” Can you give a concrete example of this?

Lines 560-569: Can you give an example of how the surpisal effect of priming depends on speakers’ experience with a specific sociolect?

Lines 570-580: As a reader, I would like to know more about exactly how levels of awareness have been measured behaviorally and through ERPs, and how your approach extends this idea.

Author Response

See the attached document for our response to reviewer 1.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Summary:

 

This manuscript makes a number of connections between structural priming, awareness and implicit learning, and language change. Drawing from these various literatures and topics, a case is made that priming, both conscious and nonconscious, could be a plausible driver of linguistic change, both within and across languages.

 

Major comments:

 

I must admit that I am unfamiliar with "Languages," so I am not certain what sorts of manuscripts are generally published herein. This manuscript is a theoretical piece, which attempts to summarize and tie together several strands of related research to make the theoretical case that structural priming is an engine for diachronic language change within and across languages. In general, I find the reasoning to be sound and the proposal plausible. I do, however have several concerns or questions about the manuscript, detailed below.

 

First, I leave it to the editor to decide if this is the sort of manuscript that is publishable in Languages. There are no empirical data presented, so it is basically a thought piece (as noted above). The authors state the "modest purpose" of the paper on lines 61-63 of "opening new potential lines of research," but I am not thoroughly convinced that this goal is achieved.

 

Second, the reason I wonder if the goal above has been achieved is that in a few places, I wrote comments asking whether the current manuscript brings anything truly novel to the discussion. For example, on p. 7, lines 303-305, Jaeger & Rosenbach are quoted as saying that "priming is the 'missing link' in evolutionary models of language change…" This, it seems to me, is the same point the current manuscript is making.

 

Third, it seems to me that rather large swaths of the various strands of research have been missed or ignored in the discussion. For example, on p. 2, lines 67-68, it is asserted that metalinguistic awareness has not received "the scholarly attention in the linguistic literature that it deserves." A quick search on Google Scholar yields some 19,400 hits for "metalinguistic awareness," however, and I know that considerable research has been done examining the construct in L1 and L2 research, as well as in reading research and language development. Similarly, the discussion of cross-linguistic priming leaves out, for example (Shin, J-A. & Christianson, K. (2009). Syntactic processing in Korean-English  bilinguals: Evidence from cross-linguistic structural priming. Cognition, 112, 175-180; Shin, J.-A. & Christianson, K. (2011). The status of dative constructions in Korean, English, and in the minds of Korean-English bilinguals. In H. Yamashita, Y. Hirose, & J. Packard (Eds.), Processing and Producing Head-final Structures, pp. 153-169. Dordrecht: Springer.). And discussions of implicit vs. explicit instruction/processing in priming and language learning leaves out (Shin, J-A. & Christianson, K. (2012). Structural priming and second language learning. Language Learning, 62, 931-964.). Also in connection with awareness and priming, the fascinating work of Vic Ferreira and colleagues examining priming in amnesiacs is missing (Ferreira, V. S., Bock, K., Wilson, M. P., & Cohen, N. J. (2008). Memory for Syntax Despite Amnesia. Psychological Science, 19(9), 940–946. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02180.x). Finally, in connection to the ideas of "communication adaption," "convergence," and "conversational alignment," many of the observations made here have been made for quite some time about a number of different languages, e.g. (Scherre, M., & Naro, A. (1991). Marking in discourse: “Birds of a feather”. Language Variation and Change, 3(1), 23-32. doi:10.1017/S0954394500000430). Finally, although the work of Franklin Chang and Gary Dell and colleagues is cited, they have proposed for quite some time that structural priming is implicit learning, and that over time could account for language change (within and, perhaps, across individuals).

 

Of course I am not saying any of the papers cited/mentioned above need to be cited in a revision necessarily, unless the authors would find them to be relevant; they are just articles that sprang to mind. But there are a lot of papers cited in these that are also not cited in the current manuscript, so I worry that the works that are cited have been cherry-picked or represent a limited survey of the literature.

 

In sum, I guess my main question is, despite the wide-ranging discussion here, is the proposal that priming (specifically structural priming) drives language change within and across languages really that novel, as presented in this version? That priming might affect change ACROSS languages strikes me as intriguing, but I'd need to see some actual data to be convinced that it happens. (The very little work I've done on language change and language contact, on the loss of the inverse verb forms in Odawa among younger speakers [unpublished data presented at the 7th Workshop on the Structure and Constituency of Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 7), 2002, Edmonton, Alberta] found no effects of contact with English on this change in Odawa, rather, that it was an internal change.) 

 

Minor points:

 

--p. 3, ln 106: remove extra space before period at end of point 1.

 

--p. 9, ln 395: delete "outstanding and"

 

--p. 9, ln 407: her -> here

 

--p. 9, ln 414: delete comma after first "priming"

 

--p. 11, ln 494: change "waitress" to "server"

 

Author Response

See the attached document for our response to reviewer 2.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Summary: An informed and thoughtful synthesis of prior findings on cross-language priming and its potential role in contact-induced change, this article also puts forward concrete, workable avenues of further research. It promises to spur new investigations and should be of broad interest.

 

General comments:

A question for the author(s) to consider moving forward is the general question of how to observe contact-induced change, other than through a priming effect boosting the rate of a syntactic choice, that is, independent measure(s) of change other than priming itself.

 

Another question to think more about concerns the role of awareness and human agency in (contact-induced) change. For one, while awareness has been shown for lexical items and phonetics, there doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence for (bilinguals') awareness of morphosyntactic differences (see Eckert & Labov 2017 "Phonetics, phonology and social meaning" Jnl Sociolinguistics, e.g., for evidence from style shifting of awareness of phonological variables, but not of abstract levels of phonological organization).

 

Detailed comments:

 

line 34: "This cross-language activation, which is assumed to 34 be not under conscious control, is a prime example of language contact in the bilingual mind, and as 35 such forms an important condition from which contact-induced language change can emerge, 36 especially when it is sustained and continuous":  

 

Please clarify referent of "it". Is it "language contact in the mind" at the level of the individual (which has just been stated to be "on" at all times, in which case "especially..." isn't applicable) or is it contact at the level of the speech community?

 

line 64: "The linguistic approaches can generally be characterized as broad-scope and hypothesis-generating, without rigorous empirical testing":

 

Suggest deleting or modifying, as sociolinguists have relied on quantitative arguments for five decades and the growing number of linguists proposing statistical models based on corpus data would surely object to such a statement

 

line 213: "Thus, in Babel (2016b) it is shown..." 

 

It would be helpful to provide the reader who is unfamiliar with this work a brief mention of the nature of the evidence which "shows" this

 

line 244: "Structural priming effects have been found both 245 from production to production, from comprehension to production, from comprehension to 246 comprehension, and with quite diverse tasks and techniques: picture description (e.g., Bock 1986), 247 sentence completion...":

 

It may be important to acknowledge degrees of strength of priming; e.g., production to production (same speaker) stronger than comprehension to production (interlocutor to speaker)

Gries, S. T. (2005). Syntactic priming: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 34, 365–399. (p.374)

 

line 276: "this can only be explained by assuming the existence of cross-language interaction at the syntactic 277 level":

 

A question moving forward is what is the nature of the interaction--the field needs to get more specific

 

line 308: "which in turn can be linked to other dimensions of research 308 on linguistic adaptation in conversational settings,...":

 

 Again, a question to think about moving forward is whether a link between linguistic adaptation in conversational settings and lasting language change has really been established

 

line 321: "This combination of socio-pragmatic and learning functions is exactly what 321 makes structural priming a plausible potential mechanism of language change."

 

Still, real-time or diachronic study is required to demonstrate priming as a mechanism of language change. Malte Rosemeyer has shown that priming (persistence) has a conserving effect (in line with Szmrecsanyi's 2005:141 view of persistence as "micro-entrenchment"), rather than promoting change.

 

line 326: "priming is key mechanism": insert "a"

 

line 391: "Given that awareness and 391 human agency is involved in language change":

 

This view may not be shared by most historical linguists. It'd be helpful to provide a reference or two

 

line 417: "The data yielded structural priming 417 effects, even a day after testing."

 

A caveat may be in order, as historical linguists would not seriously consider one day to be "long-term"

 

line 439: "These explicit memory factors are related to linguistic perspective..." Insert "the"?

 

line 495: "linguistic elements tend to be more directly 495 involved in linguistic change when they are more salient (Trudgill 1986, see also section 2.4). As such, 496 there appears to be an interesting link between priming, salience, and language change."

 

There may be some circularity of reasoning here, since Trudgil's definition of salience includes susceptibility to change

 

line 502: "They 501 interpreted this as a surprisal effect: given that these speakers in principle have a strong preference 502 for the DO structure, the (Dutch) PO sentences the participants were primed with represent 503 infrequently experienced structures that may have been surprising for them, leading to a relatively 504 high number of PO movie clip descriptions"

 

Further down, p. 13 it is stated that "Anonymous tested this hypothesis in a cross-language structural priming experiment, and indeed found evidence of structural priming from Dutch to Papiamento: the tendency to produce a DO structure in Papiamento was higher when the participants had just heard a Dutch DO sentence, and vice versa for PO sentences."

The present statement (line 502) would seem to raise the question of whether the Papiamentu speakers in the Netherlands show a smaller or no surprisal effect, since presumably they more frequently experience the PO structures (in Dutch).

 

line 634: "In fact, research by Coyle and Kaschak (2008) 634 suggests that patterns of experience with verbs indeed affect long-term cumulative structural 635 priming."

 

On cumulative effect of patterns of experience, the Author(s) may be interested in the work of Esther Brown, including

Brown, Esther L. 2015. "The role of discourse context frequency in phonological

variation: A usage-based approach to bilingual speech production." IJB

 

line 661: "then it should be the case that the surprisal effect of priming is dependent on the speakers’ personal 661 language experiences"

Author Response

See the attached pdf for our reply to the review report.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The revision appears to have addressed my major concerns in some form or another. I did not have time to read through it in detail for editorial/proofreading purposes. I noticed some missing/extraneous commas, etc. But these all seemed to be minor, with the exception of some mis-formatted references.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for getting back to us so quickly. We went through the text and references and more time and resolved all final things we could find in the text. We especially thank the reviewer for pointing us to misformatted references that we had overlooked. All references are now formatted according to the formatting standard.