Cross-linguistic Structural Priming In Chinese-English Bilinguals

People can produce and understand sentences that they have never encountered or uttered before,owing to the abstraction of mental representation of human language,i.e.some sentence elements are categorized into more general representations.What is the nature of these abstract representations,and what degree of abstraction do they involve? Answers to these questions are essential for the full understanding of language use.To explore the abstract linguistic representation,the syntactic representation in particular,the present study investigates structural priming across languages based on the studies of Scheepers et al.(2011)and Zeng Tao et al.(2015).Structural priming is a phenomenon that structures people recently have processed tend to affect people’s subsequent processing of structures.This paper employs as the target structures,the English attachment ambiguous structure “ NP+V+NP1 of NP2+RC” used in Scheepers(2011)and Chinese specific structure “ NP1+有+NP2+很+(AP)” used in Zeng Tao(2015),considering their similarities in hierarchical configuration.66 junior English major students participated in this study and quantitative research method was taken.Subjects were asked to complete a sentence fragment first and then finish sentence completion and comprehension tasks which represented language production and comprehension respectively,to investigate bidirectional production and comprehension structural priming effect.The results showed: structural priming effects exist in both L1 production and comprehension tasks;there is structural priming effect In L2 production task,whereas no effect exists in L2 comprehension task.Moreover,the priming effect in L1 comprehension is stronger than L1 production.However,In L2 tasks,structural priming effect of L2 production is stronger than L2 comprehension.The present finding confirms that the attachment height in hierarchical configuration is primed in sentence processing,supporting shared structural representations between English and Chinese language to some extent.