Shared abstract representation of linguistic structure in bilingual sentence comprehension

Abstract

Although there is strong evidence for shared abstract grammatical structure in bilingual speakers from studies of sentence production, comparable evidence from studies of comprehension is lacking. Twenty-seven (N = 27) EnglishGerman bilingual adults participated in a structural priming study where unambiguous English subject and object relative clause (RC) structures were used to prime corresponding subject and object RC interpretations of structurally ambiguous German RCs. The results showed that English object RCs primed significantly greater object RC interpretations in German in comparison to baseline and subject RC prime conditions, but that English subject RC primes did not change the participants' baseline preferences. This is the first study to report abstract crosslinguistic priming in comprehension. The results specifically suggest that word order overlap supports the integration of syntactic structures from different languages in bilingual speakers, and that these shared representations are used in comprehension as well as production.

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

“…That is, if bilinguals' syntactic choices are primed by the structure of a non-target-language, this can only be explained by assuming the existence of cross-language interaction at the syntactic level. This is indeed what has been found: cross-linguistic structural priming has been observed across many languages, using many tasks, both from the non-dominant to the dominant language and vice versa (e.g., Bernolet et al 2007Bernolet et al , 2012Cai et al 2011;Desmet and Declercq 2006;Hartsuiker et al 2016;Hartsuiker et al 2004;Jacob et al 2017;Kantola and van Gompel 2011;Kidd et al 2015;Kootstra and Doedens 2016;Loebell and Bock 2003;Salamoura and Williams 2006;Schoonbaert et al 2007;Christianson 2009, 2012;Weber and Indefrey 2009). Based on this evidence, bilingual processing models have been developed which specify the mental representations of syntactic information in bilingual speakers, their links with other levels of processing (e.g., lexical, phonological), and the development of these representations, for example during second language learning (Hartsuiker and Bernolet 2017;Hartsuiker et al 2004;Kootstra and Doedens 2016;Schoonbaert et al 2007).…”

Unified syntax in the bilingual mind

“…The limited data addressing this issue in a purely bilingual language comprehension context are also inconclusive. For example, Weber and Indefrey (2008) failed to find crosslanguage syntactic priming in bilingual language comprehension, but they did find evidence in line with the shared syntax hypothesis in a later study (Weber & Indefrey, 2009; see also Kidd, Tennant, & Nitschke, 2015).…”

Cross-language priming: A view from bilingual speech

“…Although much of this past experimental work has concentrated on verb argument structure alternations (see also Kantola & van-Gompel, 2011; Meijer & Fox Tree, 2003; Salamoura & Williams, 2006, 2007; Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker & Pickering, 2007; Shin & Christanson, 2009), priming has also been reported for genitive noun phrases from Dutch to English (e.g., the shirt of the boy / the boy's shirt ) (Bernolet, Hartsuiker & Pickering, 2013) and for adjective-noun/relative clause alternations from Dutch to German (e.g., the red ball / the ball that's red ) (Bernolet, Hartsuiker & Pickering, 2007). In addition to variation between syntactic alternations, priming has been shown for relative clause attachments from Dutch to English (e.g., someone shot the servants of the actress who was / were on the balcony ) (Desmet & Declercq, 2006), ambiguous relative clause interpretations from English to German (Kidd, Tennant & Nitschke, 2015), and the sentential location of code-switching in Dutch–English bilinguals (Kootstra, Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2012).…”