• Corpus ID: 61595260

Lexical-syntactic representations in bilingual sentence production

@inproceedings{Bernolet2008LexicalsyntacticRI,
  title={Lexical-syntactic representations in bilingual sentence production},
  author={Sarah Bernolet},
  year={2008}
}

• Sarah Bernolet
• Published 2008
• Linguistics, Psychology

Research on sentence production and comprehension has shown that the abstract structure of sentences can be primed (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for a review). Recently, it has been shown that syntactic structures can also be primed between both languages of a bilingual (Hartsuiker et al., 2004; Schoonbaert et al. 2007; Salamoura & Williams, 2007). Hartsuiker et al. (2004) therefore concluded that syntactic representations can be shared between languages in the bilingual lexicon. In this dissertation, we investigated how similar syntactic structures have to be in order to be shared (Chapters 2 & 3), whether similar structures are shared immediately (Chapter 4) and whether the syntactic preferences of verbs influence these priming effects (Chapter 5). To this aim, we conducted a series of syntactic priming experiments in which the structures of different syntactic constructions were primed within and between both languages of late Dutch-English and Dutch-German bilinguals. We found that structures that differ only in word order (e.g., the shark that is red – de haai die rood is) receive separate, word-order specific syntactic representations. Cross-linguistic priming for such structures can thus only be obtained if the structures in question share a pre-syntactic representation (e.g., a functional and/or conceptual representation). Furthermore, we discovered that all new structures of the second language receive separate representations in an initial stage of acquisition. Finally, we showed that priming effects for dative sentences are modulated by the syntactic preference (verb bias) of the dative verb that is used in the prime. This indicates that the syntactic preferences of verbs is learned and represented in memory.