If you study a word do you use it more often? Lexical repetition priming in a corpus of Natural Semantic Metalanguage publications

Abstract

Psycholinguistic and corpus studies have shown that syntactic repetition priming can influence linguistic analyses. The impact of lexical repetition priming on linguistic work, on the other hand, has not been assessed. The current study finds evidence of lexical priming in a corpus of linguistics publications on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), in which semantic analyses are written using several dozen ‘semantic primitives’ such as something, know and place. NSM theorists are repeatedly exposed to a small set of words, much like subjects in lexical repetition priming experiments. When all analyses written in NSM are removed from NSM publications, these texts are found to nevertheless include significantly more ‘primitives’ than control publications, suggesting that the study of particular words can affect linguists’ lexical choices. This is potentially problematic for semantic analyses in NSM, which consist of strings of primitives selected by the analysts. These primitives are not considered to be English words, but have the same forms as English words. If priming occurs between the NSM analyses and their English environment, theorists’ exposure to English may impact their choice of primitives and the content of their analyses.