Proficiency modulates between- but not within-language structural priming

Abstract

The oldest of the Celtic language family, Irish differs considerably from English, notably with respect to word order and case marking. In spite of differences in surface constituent structure, less restricted accounts of bilingual shared syntax predict that processing datives and passives in Irish should prime the production of their English equivalents. Furthermore, this cross-linguistic influence should be sensitive to L2 proficiency, if shared structural representations are assumed to develop over time. In Experiment 1, we investigated cross-linguistic structural priming from Irish to English in 47 bilingual adolescents who are educated through Irish. Testing took place in a classroom setting, using written primes and written sentence generation. We found that priming for prepositional-object (PO) datives was predicted by self-rated Irish (L2) proficiency, in line with previous studies. In Experiment 2, we presented translations of the materials to an English-educated control group (n = 54). We found a within-language priming effect for PO datives, which was not modulated by English (L1) proficiency. Our findings are compatible with current theories of bilingual language processing and L2 syntactic acquisition.

Is structural priming between different languages a learning effect? Modelling priming as error-driven implicit learning

“…The majority of the work on structural priming between languages has tested priming in spoken language. Nevertheless, similar priming effects have also been demonstrated in experiments where participants produced written language (Desmet & Declercq, 2006;Favier et al, 2019;Hartsuiker et al, 2016;Kantola & van Gompel, 2011).…”

“…Cross-language structural priming effects have been observed in adults from a wide age range (e.g., Loebell & Bock, 2003), in adolescents (e.g., Favier, Wright, Meyer, & Huettig, 2019;Kutasi et al, 2018), and in children (e.g., Hsin, Legendre, & Omaki, 2013;Vasilyeva et al, 2010). Most of the experiments in cross-language priming include English as the prime and/or target language.…”

“…The only exceptions to this are the studies by Cai, Pickering, Yan, and Branigan (2011) that involved Mandarin-Cantonese bilinguals, and the study by Mercan and Simonsen (2019) that included Norwegian-Turkish bilinguals. Nevertheless a wide variety of other languages has been studied in cross-language syntactic priming experiments, including German (e.g., Loebell & Bock, 2003), Spanish (e.g., Bock, 1986), Dutch (e.g., Desmet & Declercq, 2006), Greek (e.g., Salamoura & Williams, 2007), Korean (e.g., Shin & Christianson, 2009), Polish (Fleischer, Pickering, & McLean, 2012), Irish (Favier et al, 2019), Scottish Gaelic (Kutasi et al, 2018), and Swedish (Kantola & van Gompel, 2011). So far only Hartsuiker, Beerts, Loncke, Desmet, and Bernolet (2016) and Huang et al (2019) have studied cross-language priming in trilinguals (L1 Dutch -L2s English and either French or German; and L1 Mandarin -L2s Cantonese and English, respectively).…”

Between- and within-group variation in first and second language syntactic priming

“…We used self-reported proficiency, which has been found to correlate with direct measures of proficiency (Lemhofer & Broersma, 2012;Favier, Wright, Meyer & Huettig, 2019), as a control measure. Participants rated their overall proficiency, their speaking proficiency, their understanding proficiency and their reading proficiency on a scale from 0 (minimum score) to 10 (maximum score).…”

Special issue on Structural Priming in Less-Studied Languages and Dialects: Introduction

“…However, they did find that Turkish speakers were more likely to topicalize or relativize the patient if the agent was inanimate than if it was animate, a finding that is in accord with evidence from English (e.g., Clark 1965). Favier et al (2019) investigated priming of dative and transitive sentences from Irish to English. There was a small tendency to produce more English prepositional datives after Irish prepositional datives (translating as gave the pirate cake to the boxer), as compared to conjunctions (translating as a boxer, a pirate, and a cake)-an effect that was larger for participants with higher self-rated proficiency in Irish.…”