Structural priming across languages

By Kathryn Bock. 2003

402 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In structural priming, the structure of one sentence is echoed in the structure of a second sentence that may be otherwise unrelated to the first. It can occur without the intention to create syntactic parallelism and without specific pragmatic, thematic, and lexical support across utterances. To explore whether it can also occur without specific language support, when the source of priming is an utterance in a different language, we investigated structural priming in fluent German-English bilinguals. After producing a designated sentence in either their first (German) or second (English) language, speakers extemporaneously described an unrelated pictured event in the other language. The primed constructions were datives (prepositional and double-object datives) and transitives (actives and passives). The results showed that the production of German dative sentences primed the subsequent use of English datives, and the production of English datives primed German datives. German and English passives with different structures did not prime one another. The results offer evidence for a structural source of priming and suggest a common psycholinguistic scaffolding for the bilingual phenomena of codeswitching and transfer. More broadly, they support the argument for basic psycholinguistic continuities among language learning, normal and bilingual language use, and language change.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9e338bd0db49d9c33d05c5b189610c800339dc6

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Citations in the corpus

Cross-linguistic structural priming in multilinguals: further evidence for shared syntax (2016, methodology): “These verbs were also used by Loebell and Bock (2003).”
Memory and language skills in simultaneous interpreters: The role of expertise and language proficiency (2006, background): “Evidence for cross-language syntactic priming indicates nonselectivity or integration between languages also on the syntactical level (Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004; Loebell & Bock, 2003).”
Lexical and syntactic representations in closely related languages: Evidence from Cantonese–Mandarin bilinguals (2011, background): “For example, Loebell and Bock (2003) found that German– English bilinguals tended to use a PO or DO form in German after using the structurally equivalent form in English, and vice versa.”
Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism (2011, background): “A large body of psycholinguistic research indicates that speakers are susceptible to priming effects, which lead to the enhanced activation of a structure that has just been heard (Loebell & Bock, 2003; Hartsuiker, Pickering & Veltkamp, 2004).”
Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap (2009, background): “More recently, a number of studies have confirmed that priming also operates for bilingual adults across their two languages (Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Vertlkamp, 2004; Loebell and Bock, 2003; Meijer & Fox Tree, 2003; Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker & Pickering, 2007).”
Syntactic alignment and shared word order in code-switched sentence production: Evidence from bilingual monologue and dialogue (2010, background): “The cognitive mechanisms of sentence production in bilinguals are the focus in studies on cross-language syntactic priming (e.g., Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004; Loebell & Bock, 2003), but these are typically concerned with non-codeswitched sentences.”
Juggling Two Languages in One Mind (2008, background): “Although the scope of cross-language priming may be more restricted than within-language priming (e.g., Loebell & Bock, 2003), with greater priming from the L1 to the L2 than the reverse and reduced priming when word order differs across languages (Bernolet, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007), the…”
Digits vs. pictures: The influence of stimulus type on language switching (2012, background): “(100 words) syntactic structure (Loebell & Bock, 2003), distracter-words or pictures (Ehri & Rayn, 1980) or even the word type that is being produced, such as cognates (words with a similar etymological background in two or more languages, which often co-occur with a large phonological overlap;…”
Psycholinguistic and corpus-linguistic evidence for L2 constructions (2009, background): “, the fact that speakers tend to reuse syntactic patterns they have encountered (comprehended or produced) before, numerous studies suggest that linguistic processing has to involve some kind of phrase structure representation (cf. Bock 1986; Bock and Loebell 1990; Loebell and Bock 2003).”
Is Syntax Separate or Shared Between Languages? (2004, background): “Our results contrast with those of Loebell and Bock (2003) , in that they found no priming between English and German passives (in either direction).”
INTERACTION AND SYNTACTIC PRIMING: English L2 Speakers' Production of Dative Constructions (2006, background): “…task ~Bock, 1986, 1989; Bock & Griffin, 2000; Bock & Loebell, 1990; Bock et al+, 1992; Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998; Hartsuiker, Kolk, & Huiskamp, 1999; Loebell & Bock, 2003!+ In this task, participants carry out a running recognition-memory task in which they hear and repeat a sentence ~the…”
Cross-linguistic priming of syntactic hierarchical configuration information (2006, background): “Loebell and Bock (2003) had fluent German–English bilinguals repeat a sentence in either their first (German) or their second (English) language and describe a picture of an unrelated event in the other language.”
Discourse conditions on subject pronoun realization: Testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual children (2009, background): “…priming are now well attested in the literature and may go some way to explain the overacceptance and overproduction of overt subject pronouns in bilingual speakers of null-subject languages (Meijer and Fox Tree, 2003; Loebell and Bock, 2003; Hartsuiker et al., 2004; Schoonbaert et al., 2007).”