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

Abstract

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.

Proficiency modulates between- but not within-language structural priming

“…There is some evidence to support the contribution of L2 proficiency to structural priming, from L1 to L2 and also within L2 (reviewed by Hartsuiker and Bernolet 2017). However, this has not been a consistent finding in the literature to date (e.g., Hartsuiker et al 2016;Kutasi et al 2018). We consider these studies in more detail in the discussion section.…”

“…Written consent was obtained both from participants and their parents/guardians. We used a questionnaire (adapted from Kutasi et al 2018; ''Appendix 2'') to assess Irish language history, frequency of use, and selfrated proficiency across speaking, listening, reading, and writing on a 7-point scale. Table 1 summarises the results of the questionnaire, which was completed by thirty-six participants.…”

“…Active-passive set We created 48 transitive items for the active-passive set, which consisted of prime sentences in Irish and their corresponding pictures, paired with target pictures to elicit sentences in English. Picture stimuli were black and white line drawings of transitive events involving human agents and patients (adapted from Bernolet et al 2016, andKutasi et al 2018). As in Kutasi et al patients always appeared on the left, to increase the likelihood of eliciting passives.…”

“…As demonstrated above, Irish datives and passives overlap with their English counterparts to varying degrees, but it is clear that surface structure is not identical across languages. We based our predictions on previous evidence for cross-linguistic priming in the absence of shared surface structure (Kutasi et al 2018;Shin andChristianson 2009, but see Bernolet et al 2007). Firstly, we predicted that Irish dative sentences would prime the production of PO datives in English.…”

“…One issue still subject to debate is the importance of syntactic congruency between languages, with implications for the scope of shared syntax in bilingualism. While some studies have found that the cross-linguistic priming effect depends on both languages sharing the same surface constituent structure (e.g., Loebell and Bock 2003;Bernolet et al 2007), others have demonstrated structural priming between languages with major typological differences such as Korean and English (Shin and Christianson 2009), and Scottish Gaelic and English (Kutasi et al 2018).…”