From language-specific to shared syntactic representations: The influence of second language proficiency on syntactic sharing in bilinguals

Bernolet, Sarah; Hartsuiker, Robert J.; Pickering, Martin J.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.005

Cited by 138 publications

(234 citation statements)

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“…Another way of testing for proficiency effects is by considering individual differences in the strength of priming. Thus, Bernolet et al (2013) observed stronger priming with genitives the more proficient the subjects were. Additionally, Hartsuiker and Bernolet (in press) reanalyzed the data of Schoonbaert et al (2007) and observed a similar modulation of priming by proficiency in cross-linguistic priming with dative sentences.…”

Section: Effects Of Proficiency and Linguistic Relatednessmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Consistent with that account, priming was obtained between Dutch and German, which have the same word order. Bernolet et al (2013) observed that priming of genitive structures (the nun's hat vs. the hat of the nun) was multilingual cross-linguistic priming 12 much stronger within-L2 than between L1 and L2. They argued that the English genitive, which differs from its Dutch counterpart in morphology and usage constraints, is learned rather late and so is not yet shared in the participants with relatively low proficiency.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Within-language priming is stronger than between-language priming when the structure and its equivalent are so different that their syntactic representation cannot be shared (Bernolet et al, 2007) or is only shared in more proficient bilinguals (Bernolet et al, 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Hartsuiker

Beerts

Desmet

et al. 2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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112

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The experiments tested whether structural priming within a language differs from priming between languages and whether priming between a first and second language differs from priming between two different second languages.Experiment 1 tested priming of relative clause attachment from Dutch (the subjects' first language), French, or English (two second languages) to Dutch. Experiments 2 and 3 were similar but had respectively French and English as the target language. Experiment 4 tested dative priming from Dutch, English, and German (another second language) to English. Structural priming was always as strong within-as between-languages and priming between a first and a second language was always as strong as priming between two second languages. These findings support accounts that assume syntax is shared across languages.Keywords: Bilingualism; Multilingualism; Structural Priming; Sentence Production multilingual cross-linguistic priming 3 Worldwide it is the rule rather than the exception that people speak more than one language (Graddol, 2004;Grosjean, 1992); in some parts of the world most people even speak more than two languages. For instance, most people from the region of Flanders, Belgium, have Dutch as their first language (L1), but also know French, English and sometimes German as a second language (L2) 1 , which they typically started to learn towards the end of primary school, at the beginning of secondary school, and in the last years of secondary school respectively. Many studies on bilingualism have asked whether there are influences of L1 on processing an L2 (e.g., Thierry & Wu, 2007) or vice versa (e.g., Van Assche, Drieghe, Duyck, & Hartsuiker, 2009). Fewer studies have considered cross-language influences in speakers of more than two languages. However, multilingualism offers the possibility of comparing cross-linguistic influences between a first and second language with influences between two different second languages (see Lemhöfer, Dijkstra, & Michel, 2004;Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002 for such studies in the lexical domain). This article will present such a comparison in the domain of sentence production in order to arbitrate between theories that assume syntactic representations are shared or separate across a multilingual's languages. Although most cognitive-psychological studies on multilingualism have focused on the representation or processing of words, there is an increasing interest in research on syntactic processes in bilingual sentence production (e.g., Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004;Kootstra, Van Hell, & Dijkstra, 2010;Loebell & Bock, 2003; Meyer & Fox Tree, 2003). Most of these studies use the structural priming paradigm, which is based on the phenomenon that the choice out of two alternative syntactic structures (e.g., an active instead of a passive multilingual cross-linguistic priming 4 sentence) is influenced by having recently processed a prime sentence with that specific structure (Bock, 1986). In a series of seminal studies, Bock and colleagues ruled out that st...

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Section: Effects Of Proficiency and Linguistic Relatednessmentioning

confidence: 88%

mentioning

confidence: 96%

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

Hartsuiker

Beerts

Desmet

et al. 2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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112

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“…Note that the effect of proficiency does not demonstrate any effect of proficiency on priming, and so we cannot conclude that proficiency affects the degree to which representations are integrated across languages (cf. Bernolet et al 2013). Of course, our participants were quite homogenous in terms of age, learning environment, and selfrated proficiency, and further work is needed to investigate this issue.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shared representation of passives across Scottish Gaelic and English: evidence from structural priming

et al. 2018

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Evidence from cross-linguistic priming suggests that bilinguals can share their representations of constructions that occur in both languages. Some studies suggest that such sharing occurs only when the constructions involve identical syntactic categories and word order, thereby supporting a restricted sharedstructure account of bilingual linguistic representation. But other studies suggest that such exact repetition is not necessary for priming. To address this question, we conducted an experiment in which bilingual speakers of Scottish Gaelic and English heard Gaelic utterances involving actives, two types of passives, or noun phrase conjunctions (as a baseline), and then produced English transitive descriptions. Their target descriptions tended to use the same construction as the prime utterances. As both active and passive word order differs between Gaelic and English, the results support a less restricted sharedstructure account of bilingual linguistic representation.

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“…The age of onset of the L2 varies within studies, as does the exposure to the L2 (e.g., 6-20 years in McDonough, 2006), making it difficult to investigate the question of learning as a function of priming input. In one study designed to examine priming effects as a function of L2 proficiency, participants' self-reports revealed that the mean L2 proficiency in all groups tested was well above beginning levels (Bernolet, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2013), which also makes it difficult to engage in a discussion about the process of acquiring new forms.…”

Section: The Use Of the Syntactic Priming Paradigm With L2 Learnersmentioning

confidence: 98%

Increasing Second Language Learners’ Production and Comprehension of Developmentally Advanced Syntactic Forms

Gámez

Vasilyeva

2014

Language Learning and Development

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From language-specific to shared syntactic representations: The influence of second language proficiency on syntactic sharing in bilinguals

Cited by 138 publications

References 42 publications

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

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

Shared representation of passives across Scottish Gaelic and English: evidence from structural priming

Increasing Second Language Learners’ Production and Comprehension of Developmentally Advanced Syntactic Forms

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