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Experimental evidence reveals that ungrammatical structures can be primed in bilinguals, suggesting implications for language change.
Research investigating the psycholinguistic foundations of contact-induced grammatical language change suggests that new structures may enter a language through cross-linguistic structural priming in bilinguals. However, this claim implicitly assumes that priming effects can emerge even for structures which are ungrammatical in the target language. In the present study, we test this key assumption by investigating cross-linguistic ungrammatical priming for analytic comparatives between Turkish and German. In a self-paced reading experiment, Turkish–German bilinguals read German target sentences with grammatically incorrect analytic comparatives (e.g., *mehr interessant ). These were preceded by a Turkish prime sentence which included a Turkish analytic comparative ( daha konforlu ) or an otherwise identical indicative control prime ( konforlu ). The results showed significantly faster reading times for ungrammatical German comparatives following Turkish comparative primes than following indicative primes. In an additional grammaticality-judgement task, Turkish–German bilinguals also rated sentences with ungrammatical German analytic comparatives as significantly more acceptable than monolingually-raised German participants. These results suggest that, at least in comprehension, cross-linguistic structural priming can even occur for ungrammatical structures. We conclude that cross-linguistic ungrammatical priming constitutes a suitable candidate for a psycholinguistic mechanism driving contact-induced language change in bilingual individuals.
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Jacob et al. (2025) studied this question.
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