Collective language creativity as a trade-off between priming and antipriming

Abstract

It is now a matter of scientific consensus that priming, a recency effect of activation in memory, has a significant impact on language users’ choice of linguistic means. However, it has long remained unclear how priming effects coexist with the creative aspect of language use, and the importance of the latter has been somewhat downplayed. By introducing the results of two experiments, for English and Russian native speakers, this paper seeks to explain the mechanisms establishing balance of priming and language creativity. In study 1, I discuss the notion of collective language creativity that I understand as a product of two major factors interacting: cognitive priming effects and the unsolicited desire of the discourse participants to be linguistically creative, that is, to say what one wants to say using the words that have not yet been used. In study 2, I explore how priming and antipriming effects work together to produce collective language creativity. By means of cluster analysis and Bayesian network modelling, I show that patterns of repetition for both languages differ drastically depending on whether participants of the experiment had to communicate their messages being or not being able to see what others had written before them.