Much research in bilingualism has addressed the question of the extent to which lexical information is shared between languages. The present study investigated whether syntactic information is shared by testing if syntactic priming occurs between languages. Spanish-English bilingual participants described cards to each other in a dialogue game. We found that a participant who had just heard a sentence in Spanish tended to use the same type of sentence when describing the next card in English. In particular, English passives were considerably more common following a Spanish passive than otherwise. We use the results to extend current models of the representation of grammatical information to bilinguals.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00693.x | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Hearing Pronouns Primes Speakers to Use Pronouns.
Open Mind (Camb)
January 2025
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Speaking requires frequent decisions about how to refer, for example whether to use a pronoun (she) or a name (Ana). It is well known that this choice is guided by the discourse context, but little is known about the representations that are activated. We use priming to test whether this choice can be facilitated through recent exposure, and if so, what representations are activated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Conscious Side of 'Subliminal' Linguistic Priming: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis and Reliability Analysis of Visibility Measures.
J Cogn
January 2025
Departamento de Psicología Básica, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.
Research on unconscious processing has been a valuable source of evidence in psycholinguistics for shedding light on the cognitive architecture of language. The automaticity of syntactic processing, in particular, has long been debated. One strategy to establish this automaticity involves detecting significant syntactic priming effects in tasks that limit conscious awareness of the stimuli.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGrammatical Representations of the Verb Phrase in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from Syntactic Priming in Five-Year-Olds.
Brain Sci
October 2024
Department of Chinese as a Second Language, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei 10610, Taiwan.
Article Synopsis
- Debates persist on how to correctly represent verb phrases in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on the roles of the verb, its complement, and the aspectual marker - .
- A study involving 216 five-year-olds was conducted using syntactic priming to explore the SVO and SOV structures, revealing that both the complement and marker - should be seen as phrasal entities rather than just morphological ones.
- Results suggest that event description in Mandarin requires a specific structure, where elements after the verb represent their own phrases, challenging traditional verb-centered linguistic models and raising questions about agent-patient roles in grammar across languages.
Syntactic priming as implicit learning in German child language.
J Child Lang
October 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick.
We investigated syntactic priming in German children to explore crosslinguistic evidence for implicit learning accounts of language production and acquisition. Adult descriptions confirmed that German speakers (N=27) preferred to spontaneously produce active versus passive transitive and DO versus PO dative forms. We tested whether German-speaking children (N=29, M =5.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLexically-specific syntactic restrictions in second-language speakers.
J Mem Lang
February 2024
Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
In two structural priming experiments, we investigated the representations of lexically-specific syntactic restrictions of English verbs for highly proficient and immersed second language (L2) speakers of English. We considered the interplay of two possible mechanisms: generalization from the first language (L1) and statistical learning within the L2 (both of abstract structure and of lexically-specific information). In both experiments, L2 speakers with either Germanic or Romance languages as L1 were primed to produce dispreferred double-object structures involving non-alternating dative verbs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!