Are bilingual speakers’ representations of pronominal expressions completely independent in the two languages, or is there sharing of discourse-level representations cross-linguistically? In the present study, we address this question by using a sentence comprehension task that implements the cross-linguistic priming technique at the discourse-level.

In two experiments conducted with Spanish–English bilinguals, we prime dis-preferred interpretations for ambiguous pronouns in the second language (English) by using first language (Spanish) pronoun interpretation primes. In experiment 1, Spanish null pronouns prime second-mentioned/object interpretations in English, showing an effect of priming. In experiment 2, Spanish explicit pronouns prime second-mentioned/object interpretations in English, indicating that an effect of priming approaches significance.

The results demonstrate that bilinguals’ inferences about probability distributions and coherence relations are susceptible to cross-linguistic influence. The strength of the priming effect is discussed within models of cross-language abstract representations.

双语者对代词表达的表征在两种语言中是完全独立的，还是跨语言共享话语级表征？在本研究中，我们通过使用在语篇层面实施跨语言启动技术的句子理解任务来解决这个问题。

在对西班牙语-英语双语者进行的两个实验中，我们通过使用第一语言（西班牙语）代词解释启动来启动第二语言（英语）中歧义代词的不受欢迎的解释。在实验 1 中，西班牙语空代词启动了英语中的二次提及/宾语解释，显示了启动效应。在实验 2 中，西班牙语显式代词启动了英语中的二次提及/宾语解释，表明启动效应接近显着性。

结果表明，双语者对概率分布和连贯关系的推断容易受到跨语言的影响。启动效应的强度在跨语言抽象表示模型中进行了讨论。