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Cross-linguistic structural priming in bilinguals: priming of the subject-to-object raising construction between English and Korean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2016

YOONSANG SONG  and
YOUNGAH DO
YOONSANG SONG*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Hong Kong
YOUNGAH DO
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Hong Kong
*
Address for correspondence: Yoonsang Song, Rm 930, 9/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Department of Linguistics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kongyoonsang@hku.hk
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Abstract

A cross-linguistic structural priming experiment explores the issue of whether parallel syntactic constructions of the two languages in bilinguals share a representation when the surface word orders of the constructions differ. The target population was early balanced bilinguals of Korean and English; the tested constructions were structures relevant to the subject-to-object raising (STOR) operation, which until this study have not been used for structural priming research in cross-linguistic contexts (e.g., STOR: Mary believes Jerry to be trustworthy; non-STOR: Mary believes that Jerry is trustworthy). These syntactic structures exist in both English and Korean, but with different surface word orders. The results show that cross-linguistic priming of the STOR construction occurred, suggesting that parallel syntactic constructions of the languages in bilinguals can share a representation independent of surface word order.

Keywords

structural primingshared-syntax accountword-order-independent cross-linguistic primingbilingual language processingsubject-to-object raisingsyntactic priming
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 47 - 62
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

Supplementary material can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728916001152

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