Shared syntactic representations in non-native languages
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2022/13/0017/000559Keywords:
Multilingualism, L3 processing, Structural priming, ProficiencyAbstract
How do speakers represent and process syntactic information in their second and third language? We investigated this question through cross-linguistic syntactic priming of passives from Spanish (L3) to English (L2). We found that cross-linguistic structural priming occurs between two non-native languages in intermediate to advanced speakers of English as an L2 and Spanish as an L3. We interpret these results as evidence that multilingual speakers possess one integrated shared abstract representation of passives. The findings are compatible with an extension of the bilingual shared-syntax model to multilingual syntactic processing.
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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.
