Structural priming during sentence comprehension in Chinese English bilinguals
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.
Applied Psycholinguistics