Many cross-language sentence processing studies showed structural priming, which suggests a shared representation across languages or separate but interacting representations for each language. To investigate whether multilinguals can rely on such representations to predict structure in comprehension, we conducted two visual-world eye-tracking priming experiments with Cantonese–Mandarin-English multilinguals. Participants were instructed to read aloud prime sentences in either Cantonese, Mandarin, or English; then they heard a target sentence in Mandarin while looking at the corresponding target picture. When prime and target had different verbs, there was within-language structural priming only (Mandarin-to-Mandarin, Experiment 1). But when prime and target had translation-equivalent verbs, there was not only within-language but also between-language priming (only Cantonese-to-Mandarin, Experiment 2). These results indicate that structure prediction between languages in comprehension is partly lexically-based, so that cross-linguistic structural priming only occurs with cognate verbs.

许多跨语言句子处理研究表明结构启动，这表明跨语言的共享表示或每种语言的独立但相互作用的表示。为了研究多语言者是否可以依靠这种表征来预测理解结构，我们对粤语-普通话-英语多语言者进行了两项视觉世界眼动追踪启动实验。参与者被要求用粤语、普通话或英语大声朗读主要句子；然后他们一边听普通话的目标句子，一边看相应的目标图片。当启动词和目标词有不同的动词时，仅存在语言内结构启动（普通话到普通话，实验1）。但是当主语和目标语有翻译等价动词时，不仅存在语言内启动，还存在语言间启动（仅限粤语到普通话，实验 2）。这些结果表明，理解中语言之间的结构预测部分是基于词汇的，因此跨语言结构启动仅发生在同源动词上。