Between- and within-language priming is the same: Evidence for shared bilingual syntactic representations

Abstract

Two structural-priming experiments investigated how bilinguals represent syntactic structures. According to the shared-syntax account (Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004), bilinguals have a single syntactic representation for structures that exist in both languages, whereas separatesyntax accounts claim that the representations for these structures are language specific. Our experiments tested native speakers of Swedish who were highly proficient in English. The results showed that structural priming within language and between languages was equally strong. This indicates that representations of syntactic structures from different languages are shared and, therefore, supports the shared-syntax account.

Cross-linguistic structural priming in multilinguals: Further evidence for shared syntax

“…In these conditions, within-language priming was descriptively slightly larger than between-language priming, but this difference was not statistically significant. Note that a recent reanalysis of these data (reported inHartsuiker & Bernolet, in press) showed that the difference between withinlanguage and between-language depended on L2 proficiency, with a smaller difference for more proficient subjects.Similarly, Kantola and Van Gompel (2011) reported two structural priming experiments using datives from L2 English and L1 Swedish to Swedish and English. They tested highly proficient subjects (master's students of English) and used a written sentence completion paradigm (Pickering & Branigan, 1998).…”

“…Similarly, Kantola and Van Gompel (2011) reported two structural priming experiments using datives from L2 English and L1 Swedish to Swedish and English. They tested highly proficient subjects (master's students of English) and used a written sentence completion paradigm (Pickering & Branigan, 1998).…”

“…Hartsuiker et al (2004), for example, showed that Spanish/English bilinguals described a picture more often with a passive sentence in English ("the church is hit by lightning") when they were exposed to a passive sentence in Spanish immediately before (as opposed to an active sentence or a control sentence). multilingual cross-linguistic priming 5 Cross-linguistic syntactic priming has also been found with other syntactic alternations and with different pairs of languages (e.g., Bernolet, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007;Kantola & Van Gompel, 2011;Salamoura & Williams, 2006;Schoonbaert et al, 2007; see Hartsuiker & Pickering, 2008 and Bernolet & Hartsuiker, in press for reviews). Neuroimaging work found a neural analogue of structural priming across languages, namely decreased activation in certain brain areas in response to the second of two structurally similar sentences (repetition suppression).…”

“…Thus, on this account, the syntactic encoding processes and representations responsible for formulating a sentence in English are independent from the Dutch processes and representations, but these processes can prime each other. multilingual cross-linguistic priming 8 Similarly, Kantola and Van Gompel (2011) raised the possibility of a lexicalist, separate but interacting syntax model: There would be separate combinatorial nodes for each language, but corresponding nodes would be connected and so can prime each other. A final model of this kind was proposed by Ullman (2001).…”

Structural priming across languages

“…then, many others have evaluated the workings of structural persistence in all of these areas, expanding knowledge about the impact of structural persistence within and across an array of different languages (e.g., Cai et al 2011;Desmet and Declercq 2006;Pérez-Leroux et al 2009;Hartsuiker et al 2004;Salamoura and Williams 2007;Shin and Christianson 2009), about its manifestations in transfer (e.g., Hatzidaki et al 2011;Pyers and Emmorey 2008) and codeswitching (e.g., Kootstra et al 2012), about the representation of syntax in bilinguals (e.g., Bernolet et al 2007;Hartsuiker and Pickering 2008;Kantola and van Gompel 2011;Schoonbaert et al 2007), and about crosslinguistic similarities and differences in language structure (e.g., Arai 2012).…”