Cross-linguistic structural priming in bilinguals: priming of the subject-to-object raising construction between English and Korean

Abstract

A cross-linguistic structural priming experiment explores the issue of whether parallel syntactic constructions of the two languages in bilinguals share a representation when the surface word orders of the constructions differ. The target population was early balanced bilinguals of Korean and English; the tested constructions were structures relevant to the subject-to-object raising (STOR) operation, which until this study have not been used for structural priming research in cross-linguistic contexts (e.g., STOR: Mary believes Jerry to be trustworthy; non-STOR: Mary believes that Jerry is trustworthy). These syntactic structures exist in both English and Korean, but with different surface word orders. The results show that cross-linguistic priming of the STOR construction occurred, suggesting that parallel syntactic constructions of the languages in bilinguals can share a representation independent of surface word order.

Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Korean learners of English

“…Syntactic priming has been explored within and between languages (e.g., Bernolet et al, 2013;Kantola & van Gompel, 2011), in aural and written modalities (e.g., Kaan & Chun, 2018;Song & Do, 2018), in comprehension and production (e.g., Hartsuiker et al, 2004;Wei et al, 2017), and in lab-based settings and natural discourse. It has been studied in various languages (e.g., German: Jackson & Ruf, 2017) and with many different methodologies (e.g., confederate scripting tasks, picture description tasks).…”

“…In other words, cross-linguistic syntactic priming provides evidence that bilinguals share abstract grammatical representations between two languages. Following Hartsuiker et al (2004), several studies have evaluated the shared-syntax account using different methodologies, priming directions (i.e., L1 -L2, L2 -L1), and constructions (Bernolet et al, 2007(Bernolet et al, , 2009(Bernolet et al, , 2012(Bernolet et al, , 2013Cai et al, 2011;Chen et al, 2013;Hartsuiker et al, 2016;Hartsuiker et al, 2004;Kantola & van Gompel, 2011;Loebell & Bock, 2003;Salamoura & Williams, 2007;Shin & Christianson, 2009;Song & Do, 2018;Weber & Indefrey, 2009). For instance, Kantola and van Gompel (2011) found that Swedish L2 English learners showed equally strong syntactic priming effects when they completed Swedish or English sentence fragments after they were exposed to an English or Swedish prime sentence, where both the fragments and the prime sentences employed either a ditransitive or prepositional dative construction.…”

“…"The floors are cleaned by the janitor." However, given that the word order of prime sentences can be reflected in the production of target sentences (Hartsuiker, 1999;Hartsuiker & Westenberg, 2000), the priming effects between two languages with identical word order could result from surface word order rather than a shared abstract representation (Song & Do, 2018). Therefore, it is not always possible to identify the commonalities between two languages by whether they share the same word order (see van Gompel & Arai, 2017).…”

“…Only a few studies have dealt with the shared-syntax account with materials that test participants' language behavior independent of word order (Bernolet et al, 2007;Chen et al, 2013;Loebell & Bock, 2003;Shin & Christianson, 2009;Song & Do, 2018;Weber & Indefrey, 2009). They have had mixed results.…”

“…However, questions remain about this account's generalizability. First, there is no consensus on the extent to which shared-syntax is independent of word order (e.g., Loebell & Bock, 2003;Song & Do, 2018). Second, few studies have investigated whether cross-linguistic syntactic priming occurs, when one language has syntactic variations for a shared syntactic structure (Bernolet et al, 2012(Bernolet et al, , 2013.…”