On the limits of shared syntactic representations: When word order variation blocks priming between an artificial language and Dutch.

Abstract

Several studies used artificial language (AL) learning paradigms to investigate structural priming between languages in early phases of learning. The presence of such priming would indicate that syntactic representations are shared across these languages. found similar priming between Dutch (SVO order) and an AL with either SVO or SOV order. However, it is unclear whether such sharing would occur if the AL allows both the same and different word order as the native language. Indeed, the presence of a (easy to share) similar structure might block the sharing of a less similar structure. Here, we report two experiments that each tested 48 native speakers of Dutch on an AL that allowed both SVO and SOV order in transitive and ditransitive sentences. We assessed both within-AL and AL-Dutch priming. We predicted a) priming of both structure and word order within the AL, and b) that the presence of SVO sentences in the AL would result in weaker priming to Dutch from SOV sentences than from SVO sentences. Indeed, cross-linguistic priming was significantly weaker in the SOV compared to the SVO conditions, in line with our predictions. Unexpectedly, in the absence of a condition with verb overlap between prime and target sentences, no priming was found in AL and Dutch target conditions without verb overlap (Experiment 1), but priming emerged when a verb overlap condition was added (Experiment 2). This finding suggests that lexical overlap conditions are crucial to establish abstract syntactic representations during early L2 acquisition.

Revisiting the logic in language: The scope of 'each' and 'every' universal quantifier is alike after 'all'

“…This lowers the threshold to compute the dispreferred interpretation of the target sentences, leading participants to alternate between both target interpretations. Once this bias for a particular interpretation of the target sentence is lowered sufficiently, priming may emerge both within and between quantifiers (as previously hypothesised in a study on syntactic priming Muylle et al, 2021).…”

“…Experiments 3-4 aimed to identify the influence of experimental design. Experiment 3 tested whether priming between quantifiers depends on the presence of a within-quantifier condition (inspired by Muylle et al, 2021). This experiment revealed that priming between quantifiers emerges in experimental contexts without a within-quantifier condition but with multiple between-quantifier conditions.…”

“…We conducted two further experiments with the aim of pinpointing these design-related factors in betweenquantifier priming. In Experiment 3, we tested whether priming between quantifiers is dependent on the presence of a within-quantifier condition (inspiref by Muylle et al, 2021, who found an analogous effect in syntactic priming). We manipulated the presence of a within-quantifier condition (in addition to between-quantifier conditions) in this experiment.…”

“…To identify the precise role of experimental design, we conducted Experiment 3 and Experiment 4. These experiments tested whether between-quantifier priming is dependent on the presence of a within-quantifier priming condition (Experiment 3, see also Muylle et al, 2021) or whether between-quantifier priming is dependent on mere variation in the prime quantifiers (Experiment 4, see also Savage et al, 2006). Experiment 3 showed that the presence of a within-quantifier condition is not required for between-quantifier priming.…”

Structural priming of code-switches in non-shared-word-order utterances: The effect of lexical repetition

“…The same effect holds in bilingual language processing, when the prime is presented in one language and the response is given in another language. An important caveat here, however, is that priming seems to be less effective when word order is not shared across the two languages (e.g., Bernolet, Hartsuiker & Pickering, 2007;Hartsuiker et al, 2004;Jacob, Katsika, Family & Allen, 2017;Loebell & Bock, 2003;Muylle, Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2021). Cross-language priming effects constitute important evidence that similar syntactic representations in a bilingual's two languages are simultaneously activated and can influence each other, and, conversely, that cross-language activation is reduced during the processing of language-specific syntactic representations.…”