Cross-linguistic priming of syntactic hierarchical configuration information

Abstract

An important psycholinguistic discussion centers on the question of whether bilinguals use the same representations and mechanisms for the languages they speak (the interactive view) or whether the representations and mechanisms for each language are kept strictly separated (the modular view). Empirical investigations of this question have focused on the lexical level of language processing, either by looking at activation of word-level information or at activation of syntactic information that is closely tied to lexical entries. In three experiments, we looked at the priming of syntactic information that is unrelated to lexical entries, namely relative clause attachments. For example, in a sentence like “Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony” the relative clause can be attached to two possible noun phrases, “the servant” or “the actress.” This type of attachment is syntactic because it cannot be represented by lexical subcategorization frames (relative clauses are modifiers) or by lexically related combinatorial nodes (both interpretations have the same NP+RC structure). We found that relative clause attachments can be primed from Dutch to English in Dutch–English bilinguals. This is the first demonstration of cross-linguistic priming of syntactic information that is not directly linked to lexical entries and favors the interactive view of bilingual syntactic processing.