Shared syntactic representations in bilinguals: Evidence for the role of word-order repetition.

Abstract

Studies on syntactic priming strongly suggest that bilinguals can store a single integrated representation of constructions that are similar in both languages (e.g., Spanish and English passives; R. J. Hartsuiker, M. J. Pickering, & E. Veltkamp, 2004). However, they may store 2 separate representations of constructions that involve different word orders (e.g., German and English passives; H. Loebell & K. Bock, 2003). In 5 experiments, the authors investigated within--and between--languages priming of Dutch, English, and German relative clauses. The authors found priming within Dutch (Experiment 1) and within English as a 2nd language (Experiments 2 and 4). An important finding is that priming occurred from Dutch to German (Experiment 5), which both have verb-final relative clauses; but it did not occur between Dutch and English (Experiments 3 and 4), which differ in relative-clause word order. The results suggest that word-order repetition is needed for the construction of integrated syntactic representations.

A Review of Second Language Structural Priming Research

“…Evidence of structural priming in both datives (Gries & Wulff, 2005;McDonough, 2006;Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007) and alternation in word order between adjective-noun phrases and relative clauses (Bernolet, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007) are found in previous research. McDonough and Machey (2008) elaborate that structural priming can promote the production of the developmentally advanced language structure and suppress the production of the alternative structure in their interlanguage, which is considered to be a potential role of structural priming.…”

“…Divergence of findings, however, exists in present studies. Bernolet, Hartsuiker, and Pickering (2007) found that cross-linguistic priming occurred only when the L1 and L2 had similar word order, that is, greater within-language priming occurred than between-language priming. Thereby, we can conclude that there is no complete sharing of syntactic representation between L1 and L2.…”

A Review of the Syntactic Priming—A Research Method in Sentence Production

“…Some researches (Bernolet, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007;Loebell & Bock, 2003) found that in the process of the cross-linguistic syntactic priming, the word sequence could be activated, while other researches (Chen, Jia, Wang, Dunlap, & Shin, 2013;Shin & Christianson, 2009; argued that the word sequence could not be activated.…”

Syntactic Priming Effects between Modalities: A Study of Indirect Questions/Requests among Persian English Learners

“…After the discovery of syntactic priming (also called structural persistence and structural priming) over 20 years ago, there have been numerous studies across a wide variety of populations. Syntactic priming has been the focus of studies with children (e.g., Garrod & Clark, 1993;Fisher, 2002;Tomasello, 2000), aphasiacs (e.g., Saffran & Martin, 1997), bilinguals (e.g., Bernolet, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007;Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007), and second/foreign language learners (e.g., Gries & Wulff, 2005;Kim & McDonough, 2008;McDonough, 2006). Bock (1986) reported the first study which specifically used structural priming to investigate the processing and representation of language structures.…”