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Essay On Structural Priming

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Proposal for Structural Priming across French and Haitian Creole
Research Question:
My children and I are fluent in four languages and sometimes when we switch from one to the other we unconsciously use the sentence structure of the previous one. When I heard about structural priming in class I became fascinated with the natural reaction of the brain among people who are fluent in two or more languages. While there is a considerable amount of linguistic research on French and Haitian Creole, there are no studies that cover the area of structural priming across these two languages in particular.
Haitian Creole is usually spoken at home with parents and caregivers. French, in contrast, is not learned until around age 5, when the children start going to school. These two languages are similar to some extent. However, there are major aspects of Haitian Creole that differ from French. One of these aspects is the position of the determinator in relation to the noun. In French as well as in most Romance languages the determinator is placed in front of the noun (le livre/the book). In Creole, this is not the case, the determinator appears right after the noun (liv la/book the). Therefore, my research questions are: 1) How does structural priming work across languages that are learned in a …show more content…

Therefore, I would like to have the opportunity to explore it in further detail. Moreover, the majority of research on structural priming is mostly conducted across languages that differ from one another. Since French and Haitian Creole are very similar languages, the first being the prestige (standard) variety and the later a dialect or less prestigious variety, it will be of great interest to examine how priming works across languages that are closely related. In particular when at least one the languages is learned in a social context and not in

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