Subject pronoun expression has been extensively studied for effects of language contact, but it is fairly recent that these studies started including cross-language structural priming paradigms. The earlier studies on subject pronoun use in Turkish spoken by Turkish-Dutch bilinguals did not find any difference from monolingual speakers of Turkish but reported a few instances of unconventional use of subject pronouns, indicating the influence of Dutch on Turkish. This study aimed to determine whether structural priming may have a part in the unconventional variation observed in subject pronoun use in Turkish in contact with Dutch. Twenty-eight Turkish-Dutch bilinguals listened to short stories and responded to subsequently presented instructive sentences. These sentences were prime sentences, which contained either an overt or a null subject pronoun. Priming effects were investigated in monolingual and bilingual settings by presenting the stories in Turkish in the former and in Dutch in the latter. Results yielded a higher likelihood of using overt subject pronouns in the bilingual than in the monolingual setting following a prime sentence with an overt rather than a null pronoun. Our findings, which are based on a structure and a language that have not yet been studied much in relation to structural priming (i.e., subject pronoun use in Turkish), strengthen the empirical basis of how structural priming influences syntactic choices in language contact settings.
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