Enhancing cross-linguistic influence through across-language priming
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2021/12/0010/000483Keywords:
cross-linguistic influence, structural priming, activation, ungrammatical structure, Greek-Italian bilingualsAbstract
We investigate whether it is possible to prime a structure from a bilingual’s one language (A) to the other (B), if this structure is grammatical in A, but not in B. Specifically, we focus on the use of the verb-subject-object word-order (VSO) in broad-focus sentences, which is allowed in Greek, but not in Italian. We use an across-language priming experiment to enhance the activation of VSO in Greek and observe whether this leads to the use of VSO in Italian. The results show an increase in the production of VSO in Italian following a Greek VSO prime. Overall, the study accounts for cross-linguistic effects in terms of the activation of a certain syntactic structure in a bilingual’s processing system.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
