https://glossacontact.org/index.php/gc/issue/feed 2025-11-14T18:18:56+00:00 Nikolaos Lavidas nlavidas@enl.uoa.gr Open Journal Systems <p><strong>Glossa Contact is an international peer-reviewed Open Access journal devoted to furthering the understanding of the sources, processes, and effects of language contact, symbiosis, and change in multilingual settings.</strong></p> https://glossacontact.org/index.php/gc/article/view/3 2024-01-12T11:02:58+00:00 Seçkin Arslan Seckin.Arslan@unice.fr Mirjana Mirić mirjana.miric@bi.sanu.ac.rs Svetlana Ćirković svetlana.cirkovic@bi.sanu.ac.rs Cristian Padure cristian.padure@lls.unibuc.ro Evangelia Adamou evangelia.adamou@cnrs.fr

<p>Cross-linguistic priming has recently been shown to play a role in language change in production, but there are no studies to date demonstrating its possible role in comprehension. In the present study, we test whether a facilitating effect of cross- linguistic priming also occurs in comprehension. We focus on the order of adjectives and nouns by comparing two groups of Vlax Romani speakers (Indic branch of the Indo-European language family), Gurbet and Kalderash, who have been in century-long contact with two different languages exhibiting different adjective-noun orders: Serbian (Slavic branch), with a dominant ADJ-N order, and Romanian (Romance branch), with a dominant N-ADJ order. Prior research has shown that Gurbet speakers from Serbia, in contact with Serbian, use ADJ-N order as the default whereas Kalderash speakers from Romania, in contact with Romanian, use a N-ADJ order. We administered an eye-movement monitoring and a behavioural judgment experiment to 30 Gurbet Romani-Serbian and 25 Kalderash Romani-Romanian early bilinguals. Participants listened to 72 prime-target pairs of adjectival phrases in two possible orders (e.g., ‘hen green’, ‘green hen’), with the prime in their simultaneously early-acquired language (Serbian or Romanian) and the target in their primary L1 Romani variety. Results show that the dominant N-ADJ order in Romanian led to significant cross-linguistic priming effects in the Kalderash-Romanian group. In comparison, Gurbet participants showed a small, temporary priming effect when prime-target pairs matched the unmarked ADJ-N order. We conclude that cross-linguistic priming effects facilitate comprehension for the dominant/unmarked word orders. We propose that a combination of cross-linguistic priming effects in both production and comprehension shapes the structural convergence that takes place between two languages in contact.</p>

2025-11-14T00:00:00+00:00 Copyright (c) 2025 Seçkin Arslan, Mirjana Mirić, Svetlana Ćirković, Cristian Padure, Evangelia Adamou