Structural priming across languages

Abstract

The work that Helga Loebell and I reported in 2003 was aimed at a hypothesis that once seemed far-fetched. The hypothesis was that fluent bilinguals would exhibit structural persistence between the languages they speak. The research itself was actually conducted by Loebell 15 years earlier for her master's degree at Michigan State University. It was motivated in part by Bock's findings about the consequences of structural priming (1986, 1989), along with data we had in hand that would eventually become Bock and Loebell (1990). The effort was prodigious. Loebell collected data in Germany during several summer "holidays" that were anything but holidays. She tracked down fluent German-English bilinguals from all over southeastern Michigan, traveling back and forth from East Lansing for uncounted hours of testing, chatting, and coffee drinking.We were as surprised as anyone that the bet paid off. The problem that faced us was publicizing the results. At the time, experimental approaches to language production were in a fragile infancy. There was virtually no research on structural persistence other than Bock's, and it was viewed with widespread skepticism, regarded by many as impossible in light of the obvious productivity of syntax. The implications of the phenomenon remained unappreciated. Moreover, the outcomes of Loebell's experiments seemed too tenuous to stand up against these obstacles, and we didn't try to publish or even present them. Until Pickering and Branigan (1998) replicated and extended Bock's findings in a different paradigm, and Hartsuiker and Kolk (1998) uncovered structural persistence in Dutch, it was easy to see the effects of structural priming as a scientifically marginal fluke.Then the picture changed. There were repeated replications and an emerging understanding of what was potentially afoot in an abstract structural mechanism that could support learning (e.g., Ferreira et al. 2008). There was increased interest in the psycholinguistics of bilingualism. And there was the opportunity to publish our research in Linguistics, offered by Daniel Glatz and Christiane von Stutterheim, and to speculate about how structural persistence might affect bilingual language use, language learning, language contact, and language change. Since