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Do structure predictions persevere to multilinguals’ other languages? Evidence from cross-linguistic structural priming in comprehension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2023

Xuemei Chen Open the ORCID record for Xuemei Chen [Opens in a new window] ,
Suiping Wang Open the ORCID record for Suiping Wang [Opens in a new window]  and
Robert J. Hartsuiker Open the ORCID record for Robert J. Hartsuiker [Opens in a new window]
Xuemei Chen*
Affiliation:
Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, 510631 Guangzhou, China School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China
Suiping Wang*
Affiliation:
Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, 510631 Guangzhou, China
Robert J. Hartsuiker
Affiliation:
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
*
Address for correspondence: Suiping Wang, or Xuemei Chen, Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Zhongshan Avenue 55, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510631, China. Email: wangsuiping@m.scnu.edu.cn or xuemei.chen@m.scnu.edu.cn.
Address for correspondence: Suiping Wang, or Xuemei Chen, Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Zhongshan Avenue 55, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510631, China. Email: wangsuiping@m.scnu.edu.cn or xuemei.chen@m.scnu.edu.cn.
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

multilingualismstructural primingsentence comprehension
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , August 2023 , pp. 653 - 669
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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