Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Priming Effects In Tibetan-Chinese-English Trilinguals

The way syntactic knowledge is represented in a multilingual mind has been one of the core issues in psycholinguistics.Many researchers have tried to explore this topic.However,no consensus has been reached on this problem.The syntactic representations are considered to be shared if within-and between-language priming effects are equivalent.However,previous studies showed inconsistent results on this issue.There are some other possible variables for a shared syntax.One of them is language proficiency,although its effects have not been proven with no doubt.Word order was taken by some researchers as the necessity for shared syntactic representations.while some other researchers found it not necessary.Although many researchers have been working on multilingual’ syntactic representations,there are no consistent results.In this regard,it is necessary to conduct experiments on less-studied participants to provide further evidence.Furthermore,most previous studies only conducted experiments investigating the language priming effect in a single direction(e.g.,L1-L2),which may be the reason why previous findings disagree with each other.Additionally,earlier studies mostly use the counterpart of a grammatical structure out of two alternations as the reference of priming,instead of a controlled condition.The priming effects calculated in this way may be not what they actually were,which could influence the results.The present study adopted the picture description paradigm to investigate cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects(CLSP)in Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals,in order to examine whether Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals own shared syntactic representations among the different languages.Two experiments were conducted,including six combinations of priming conditions.Three research questions are explored in this study:Question 1.Do inconsistencies in the word order of the prime and target languages affect cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects?Question 2.Does L3 proficiency affect the cross-linguistic syntactic priming effect,when L3 is the target language or prime language?Question 3.Are the within-language syntactic priming effects bigger than the between-language syntactic priming effects?Altogether 116 participants were recruited for this study,who were 11th-grade students at Gannan Hezuo Tibetan High School in China.Half of the participants took part in Exp 1 and the other half participated in Exp 2.The results of the data analysis showed that:(1)Although Tibetan has a different word order from Chinese and English in dative constructions,CLSP effects still occurred in L1-L2 and L1-L3 priming despite the relatively weaker effects.(2)L3 proficiency did not affect the magnitude of CLSP in L3-L2 priming and all the conditions taking L3 as the target language,which was in consistence with some previous studies(e.g.,Son,2020).(3)Consistent with the prediction of Hartsuiker et al.’s(2004)shared syntax account,within-language priming did not differ from between-language priming significantly,as prime language does not affect priming effects in both Exps.1 and 2.The present study provides further evidence for the shared syntax account.As languages involved in this study are not very similar to each other in terms of typology and there was no difference between the two proficiency groups,it may be inferred that the requirements of shared syntactic representations in language similarity and proficiency are not very demanding.