One word leads to ... or you've been primed!

Introducing students to the idea of lexical priming and a web tool called Netspeak

Photo by Tzvi Meller

In my previous post from the For the classroom category I shared a lesson idea which I developed for Honesty Day celebrated on 30 April (click here to see it). Apart from the song and discussion activities, students also read three articles from the Breaking News English website. To lead in to the articles I cut up the three headlines and asked my students to unjumble them, i.e. put the words in the right order. With hindsight I realised that I'd set up my students to fail as one of the headlines read:

Homeless man in credit card honesty

You often hear of credit card fraud (or perhaps credit card debt) but credit card honesty is an unlikely combination in a linguistic sense.

The ability to unjumble sentences is not only a matter of syntactic knowledge but also lexical competence. Hence it is much easier to unjumble sentences consisting of predictable word combinations or things that people would actually say.  If you ask your students to unjumble a lexically impossible sentence or a headline based on word-play they will struggle with it.


Lexical priming
The "impossible" headline above prompted a discussion in class which led us into the idea of lexical priming. In psychology, priming refers to the effect previously presented stimuli have on your response to a later stimulus. The theory of lexical priming, put forward by Michael Hoey (2005), suggests that language users store the words in the context in which they have encountered them. Hoey argues that as a result of these multiple encounters we are primed to replicate these contexts in subsequent encounters, whether we read, listen, write or speak. For example, complete this phrase:

it never ceases to ___________

Of all the verbs that are semantically possible in the above sentence you probably chose amaze because you've been primed to reproduce what you've heard or seen many times before. Encountering a word repeatedly in particular ways makes you use it confidently and almost subconsciously in the same context.

Thus the theory not only accounts for why words are expected to be found in company of certain other words and occur in certain patterns but also provides a compelling explanation of fluency. Its everyday manifestation - a phenomenon which students will easily relate to - is in the ability to finish our interlocutors' sentences. Another common example is our ability to understand song lyrics even if the odd word is unintelligible here and there.

The theory (you can read more about it on this website) is also interesting as it solves the contentious native vs non-native speaker issue. Hoey effectively does away with the native / non-native dichotomy and instead puts them on a continuum. According to him, native speakers are also learners in that they continue being exposed to new primings throughout their lives. What makes them more advanced on the continuum is the sheer number of exposures they have had.

Netspeak
Netspeak - not to be confused with the way of speaking used to converse on the Internet - is an online tool which allows you to find any word in a search phrase or - in computational linguistics terms - perform a wild card query. It is particularly handy when you have doubts about how a phrase is formed or cannot find the right word. For example, this is what a search on it never ceases to ... returned:

You can click on the plus (+) to get sample sentences drawn from corpora.

What students can do with Netspeak:
Apart from checking the best way to complete a phrase, learners can do the following things using Netspeak:

Check for correct prepositions
For example, students are unsure whether they should say go for a trip or go on a trip. Enter in the search field

go ? a trip

It's particularly useful with those tricky dependent prepositions:

interested ... 
fascinated ...

NB. Use a question mark (?) to find one word and multiple dots (...) to find any number of words.


Find a suitable adjective
For example, your Business English student is writing a cover letter to send with his CV. He can search for

 I have ... experience 

One of the top results will be "extensive"

I am sure there are many other ways you can use this tool in and if you have any more ideas, please share by leaving a comment below.

Priming activity for students
Here is a short activity I used with my students - feel free to use it (suitable for intermediate level and up). Make sure students compare their answers with each other before looking them up on Netspeak. You will see that in some cases they will end up with just one word (a result of a strong priming) while in others there will be a few possibilities.

Download the activity by clicking HERE or preview below:


References & further reading

Hoey, M. (2000). A World Beyond Collocation: New Perspectives on Vocabulary Teaching. In Lewis, M. (Ed.), Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach (pp. 224-243). Hove: Thomson-Heinle

Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical Priming: A new theory of words and language. London: Routledge.

If you happen to have a copy of the Macmillan English Dictionary, there is an article written by Michael Hoey in the Language Awareness section (LA12-13) for language learners in which he explains in a very accessible language the theory of lexical priming and how a good learners' dictionary can help students accelerate their priming.