Abstract
The oldest of the Celtic language family, Irish differs considerably from English, notably with respect to word order and case marking. In spite of differences in surface constituent structure, less restricted accounts of bilingual shared syntax predict that processing datives and passives in Irish should prime the production of their English equivalents. Furthermore, this cross-linguistic influence should be sensitive to L2 proficiency, if shared structural representations are assumed to develop over time. In Experiment 1, we investigated cross-linguistic structural priming from Irish to English in 47 bilingual adolescents who are educated through Irish. Testing took place in a classroom setting, using written primes and written sentence generation. We found that priming for prepositional-object (PO) datives was predicted by self-rated Irish (L2) proficiency, in line with previous studies. In Experiment 2, we presented translations of the materials to an English-educated control group (n = 54). We found a within-language priming effect for PO datives, which was not modulated by English (L1) proficiency. Our findings are compatible with current theories of bilingual language processing and L2 syntactic acquisition.
Highlights
Structural priming and, perhaps most intriguingly, cross-linguistic structural priming, can be used as tools to investigate how the mind represents abstract syntactic information
To cite a classic example, Bock (1986) found that after hearing and repeating a sentence like The corrupt inspector offered a deal to the bar owner, participants were more likely to use a prepositional-object dative to describe an unrelated pictured event (e.g., The boy is handing a valentine to the girl), compared with its alternative, the double-object dative (The boy is handing the girl a valentine)
Since it was first reported over 30 years ago, the effect of recent syntactic experience on subsequent production has been demonstrated with a variety of tasks, syntactic structures, and languages
Summary
Structural priming and, perhaps most intriguingly, cross-linguistic structural priming, can be used as tools to investigate how the mind represents abstract syntactic information. We investigate cross-linguistic structural priming in a sample of ‘new speakers’ of Irish: bilingual adolescents attending an urban, Irish-medium secondary school Adolescents arguably constitute another under-represented group in the language processing literature, often falling outside the remit of both developmental and adult studies. We considered Junior Certificate English grades as a reasonable proxy for L1 proficiency, providing an overall picture of participants’ language aptitude, despite the potential noise introduced by less relevant components of the assessment such as literature These grades were included as an exploratory covariate in the priming analyses in Experiment 2. Ethical approval for the study was granted by the Education and Health Sciences Research Ethics Committee at the University of Limerick, Ireland
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