Role of structural priming in contact-induced change: Subject pronoun expression in L1 Turkish by Turkish-Dutch bilinguals

Abstract

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.

Structural Priming, Levels of Awareness, and Agency in Contact-Induced Language Change

“…Given that the first-person subject is always overtly produced in English, this priming across language may well cause these bilinguals to produce overt subjects relatively often in Spanish, potentially leading to a shift in the frequency distributions over overt vs. dropped subject use in this linguistic community. Similar results have recently been found by Sodacı et al (2019) in Turkish-Dutch bilinguals. Dutch is like English in that subject pronouns are always overtly produced, while Turkish is like Spanish in that overt use of subject pronouns is not standard and follows certain pragmatic regularities.…”

Variable subject expression in second language acquisition

“…The diverse coding schemes employed in these studies may well stem from the fact that persever-ation has been shown to happen on various levels of linguistic representation including syntactic, semantic, structural, and lexical (see Pickering & Ferreira 2008for a review, Travis 2007. For example, while lexical repetition appears to boost the strength of perseveration, perseveration also appears to happen between linguistic structures in the absence of lexical repetition (Pickering & Ferreira 2008, Travis 2007) and even when speakers switch between languages (de Prada Pérez 2018, Gries & Kootstra 2017, Sodaci 2018, Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010.…”