How do bilingual speakers represent and use information that guides the assembly of the words into phrases and sentences (i.e., sentence structures) for languages that have different word orders? Cross-language syntactic priming effects provide mixed evidence on whether bilinguals access sentence structures from both languages even when speaking just one. Here, we compared English monolinguals, Korean-immersed Korean-English bilinguals, and English-immersed Korean-English bilinguals while they produced noun phrases (“the lemon below the lobster”), which have different word orders in English and Korean (the Korean translation word order is [lobster][below][lemon]). We examined when speakers plan each noun using an extended picture-word interference paradigm, by measuring articulation times for each word in the phrase with either the distractor word “apple” (which slows the planning of “lemon”) or “crab” (which slows the planning of “lobster”). Results suggest that for phrases that are different in linear word order across languages, bilinguals only access the sentence structure of the one language they are actively speaking at the time, even when switching languages between trials.

讲英语的人如何表示和使用信息，以指导将单词汇编为短语和句子（即句子结构））用于具有不同字序的语言？跨语言句法启动效果提供了混合的证据，证明即使在只说一种语言时，双语者是否也会从两种语言访问句子结构。在这里，我们比较了英语的单语者，韩语的韩语-英语双语者和英语的韩语-英语双语者，它们产生的名词短语（“龙虾下面的柠檬”）在英语和韩语（韩语）中具有不同的词序翻译单词的顺序为[龙虾] [下方] [柠檬]）。我们研究了说话者何时使用扩展的图片词干扰范例来计划每个名词，方法是通过使用干扰词“苹果”（减慢“柠檬”的计划）或“螃蟹”（其中减慢了“龙虾”的计划）。