Do structure predictions persevere to multilinguals’ other languages?: Evidence from cross-linguistic structural priming in comprehension

• Autores: Xuemei Chen, Suiping Wang, Robert J. Hartsuiker
• Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 26, Nº 4, 2023, págs. 653-669
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Many cross-language sentence processing studies showed structural priming, which suggests a shared representation across languages or separate but interacting representations for each language. To investigate whether multilinguals can rely on such representations to predict structure in comprehension, we conducted two visual-world eye-tracking priming experiments with Cantonese–Mandarin-English multilinguals. Participants were instructed to read aloud prime sentences in either Cantonese, Mandarin, or English; then they heard a target sentence in Mandarin while looking at the corresponding target picture. When prime and target had different verbs, there was within-language structural priming only (Mandarin-to-Mandarin, Experiment 1). But when prime and target had translation-equivalent verbs, there was not only within-language but also between-language priming (only Cantonese-to-Mandarin, Experiment 2). These results indicate that structure prediction between languages in comprehension is partly lexically-based, so that cross-linguistic structural priming only occurs with cognate verbs.