Bobb, S. & Mani, N.
Free-floater Research Group Language Acquisition. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Göttingen, Germany.
Analogous to studies on bilingual language representation, the present study addresses the possibility of parallel lexical activation of dialect variations in speakers of two language dialects. Native speakers of German who speak High German (HG) and a dialect of Konstanz (KG) and those who speak only HG were tested on an intermodal priming task embedded in a lexical decision task. Each trial consisted of a dialect-neutral picture prime followed by an auditory target word in HG. Pictures were paired with a target that could be phonologically primed by an HD label and one that could be primed with a KD label. For example, the HG label of Mast /mast/ could prime HG words with /s/ such as Masse /masə/. The KG label of Mast /maʃt/ could prime HG words with /ʃ/ such as Masche /maʃə/. We asked whether bidialectal participants would coactivate both HG and KG dialects in a monodialectal HG experimental environment. If the picture prime coactivates both dialects during language processing, we predicted bidialectal participants to show priming for both HG and KG conditions. Preliminary priming effects are interpreted in light of present models of lexical processing.