Is syntax shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish/English bilinguals

Robert J. Hartsuiker1, Martin J. Pickering1 and Eline Veltkamp2
1. University of Edinburgh
2. University of Utrecht

An important issue for theories of language production and bilingualism is whether linguistic representations are duplicated for each language we speak, or whether they are shared whenever possible. Most linguistic theories assume that grammar of languages vary, but not in a random way. So for any two languages some constructions will be different but others will be shared. For example, English and Spanish, along with many other languages, can express similar messages using either an active (e.g., The taxi chases the truck) or a passive (e.g., The truck is chased by the taxi). Thus, English and Spanish appear to have similar grammatical rules for actives and passives. Bilingual speakers of these languages might capitalize on this similarity by representing the active and passive rules once only. Alternatively, they might keep the representations separate for each language, even though information would be redundantly represented.

To test this, we exploited the phenomenon of syntactic priming: the tendency for speakers to mirror syntactic structures they have recently produced or comprehended (e.g., Bock, 1986; Hartsuiker & Westenberg, 2000). One is more likely to describe a picture with a passive sentence if one has just repeated another, unrelated, passive rather than an active. This can be considered the result of pre-activation of syntactic representations, increasing the probability that the same syntactic choice is made (Pickering & Branigan, 1998). If syntax is shared between languages, one would expect cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects of sentences with a similar structure in both languages. We employed Branigan et al.'s (2000) confederate-scripting task. Spanish/English bilinguals took it in turns to describe pictures showing simple events. One participant was a confederate of the experimenter. She described pictures in Spanish, according to a script that specified syntactic form. Subsequently, the real participant described a picture in English. Prime sentences included actives and passives (which also occur in English), 'dislocated' actives with OVS word order (which do not occur in English), and intransitives (control condition). We considered only actives and passives legitimate ways of describing target pictures in English.

The proportion of active responses (out of all actives and passives) was significantly lower following passive prime sentences then following control sentences. However, there was no effect of either active or dislocated active sentences. Thus, syntactic priming is not necessarily symmetrical. This assymmetry is consistent with monolingual studies (Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998; Hartsuiker et al., 1999). Most importantly, the results suggest that languages indeed share syntactic representations: comprehending a Spanish passive increases the probability that an English passive is subsequently produced.

References

Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355-387.

Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., & Clelland, A. A. (2000). Syntactic co-ordination in dialogue. Cognition, 75, B13-B25.

Hartsuiker, R. J., & Kolk, H. H. J. (1998). Syntactic persistence in Dutch. Language and Speech, 41, 143-184.

Hartsuiker, R. J., Kolk, H. H. J., Huiskamp, P. (1999). Priming word order in sentence production. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 52A, 129-147.

Hartsuiker, R. J., & Westenberg, C. (2000). Word order priming in written and spoken sentence production. Cognition, 75, B27-B39.

Pickering, M. J., & Branigan, H. P. (1998). The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 633 - 651.