Lexical-syntactic representations in bilingual sentence production

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

The role of explicit memory in syntactic persistence : effects of lexical cueing and load on sentence memory and sentence production

Speakers' memory of sentence structure can persist and modulate the syntactic choices of subsequent utterances (i.e., structural priming). Much research on structural priming posited a multifactorial account by which an implicit learning process and a process related to explicit memory jointly contribute to the priming effect. Here, we tested two predictions from that account: (1) that lexical repetition facilitates the retrieval of sentence structures from memory; (2) that priming is partly driven by a short-term explicit memory mechanism with limited resources. In two pairs of structural priming and sentence structure memory experiments, we examined the effects of structural priming and its modulation by lexical repetition as a function of cognitive load in native Dutch speakers. Cognitive load was manipulated by interspersing the prime and target trials with easy or difficult mathematical problems. Lexical repetition boosted both structural priming (Experiments 1a-2a) and memory for sentence structure (Experiments 1b-2b) and did so with a comparable magnitude. In Experiment 1, there were no load effects, but in Experiment 2, with a stronger manipulation of load, both the priming and memory effects were reduced with a larger cognitive load. The findings support an explicit memory mechanism in structural priming that is cue-dependent and attention-demanding, consistent with a multifactorial account of structural priming

Effects of phonological feedback on the selection of syntax: Evidence from between-language syntactic priming

Research on word production in bilinguals has often shown an advantage for cognate words. According to some accounts, this cognate effect is caused by feedback from a level that represents information about phonemes (or graphemes) to a level concerned with the word. In order to investigate whether phonological feedback influences the selection of words and syntactic constructions in late bilinguals, we investigated syntactic priming between Dutch and English genitive constructions (e.g., the fork of the girl vs. the girl’s fork). The head nouns of prime and target constructions were always translation equivalents. Half of these were Dutch–English cognates with a large phonological overlap (e.g., vork–fork), the other half were non-cognates that had very few phonemes in common (e.g., eend–duck). Cognate status boosted between-language syntactic priming. Further analyses showed a continuous effect of phonological overlap for cognates and non-cognates, indicating that this boost was at least partly caused by feedback from the translation equivalents’ shared phonemes

Alternation biases in corpora vs. picture description experiments: DO-biased and PD-biased verbs in the Dutch dative alternation

In semantic studies of argument structure alternations as well as in recent psycholinguistic research on syntactic priming, the concept of alternation bias, i.e. the lexical preferences of individual verbs for one of two (or more) alternating constructions, plays a crucial role. This paper offers a detailed comparison of the results from Colleman’s (2009) corpus-based investigation of the dative alternation in Dutch with the findings from a series of picture description experiments reported in Bernolet (2008). On the one hand, this comparison reveals a striking contrast between both datasets in terms of the overall proportions of double object (DO) versus prepositional dative (PD) instances. On the other hand, it will be shown that the alternation biases of individual dative verbs are actually quite consistent across both the corpus and the experimental data, provided these are measured in a way which evaluates the observed frequencies for individual verbs against the overall observed frequencies in the respective datasets