Cross-Linguistic Priming Effects on Lexical Items and Grammatical Case Features in Korean Learners of English

Priming effects have been observed in bilingual individuals, indicating that both lexical and syntactic levels may share representations between the two languages. However, It remains unclear whether priming effects extend to grammatical case features across languages. This study aims to address this question through two experiments. In Experiment 1, the online environment was used to replicate lexical repetition priming effects between Korean and English (e.g. 빵bread-bread). Experiment 2 expanded on this by examing priming effects of case features alongside lexical items between Korean and English. Korean prime words with case markers were presented within English sentences (e.g. Mary bought 빵을breadACC bread). The results showed that lexical repetition priming effects were robust regardless of whether primes were fully visible or not. However, case features did not demonstrate statistically significant priming effects in either condition. These findings suggest that grammatical features, specifically case features, may not form shared representations between languages in the same way that lexical items do.