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Structural priming during sentence comprehension in Chinese–English bilinguals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2016

YUFEN HSIEH
YUFEN HSIEH*
Affiliation:
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Yufen Hsieh, Department of Applied Foreign Languages, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, 43 Section 4, Keelung Road, Taipei 106, Taiwan. E-mail: yfhsieh@mail.ntust.edu.tw
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Abstract

Cross-linguistic priming in comprehension is understudied, and it remains unclear whether bilinguals have shared abstract syntactic representations during sentence comprehension. This article reports a self-paced reading experiment investigating the influence of Chinese passive relative clauses on the interpretation of English sentences that are temporarily ambiguous between an active main clause and a passive reduced relative (dispreferred) structure. The results showed that reading Chinese passive relative primes reduced processing difficulty in English targets at the dispreferred disambiguation. Chinese-to-English priming in comprehension occurred without lexical and word-order equivalence between primes and targets. In addition, translation-equivalent verbs did not boost cross-linguistic structural priming. The findings support an account under which bilingual sentence processing involves abstract, unordered syntactic representations that are integrated between languages.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 657 - 678
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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