Structural priming during sentence comprehension in Chinese–English bilinguals

• YUFEN HSIEH ^[1]
  1. [1] National Taiwan University of Science and Technology

     National Taiwan University of Science and Technology

     Taiwán

     
• Localización: Applied psycholinguistics, ISSN 0142-7164, Vol. 38, Nº 3, 2017, págs. 657-678
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • 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.