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The role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2016

GUNNAR JACOB ,
KALLIOPI KATSIKA ,
NEILOUFAR FAMILY  and
SHANLEY E. M. ALLEN
GUNNAR JACOB
Affiliation:
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam
KALLIOPI KATSIKA
Affiliation:
University of Kaiserslautern
NEILOUFAR FAMILY
Affiliation:
University of Kaiserslautern
SHANLEY E. M. ALLEN*
Affiliation:
University of Kaiserslautern
*
Address for correspondence: Prof. Dr. Shanley Allen, Department of Social Sciences, University of Kaiserslautern, Erwin-Schrödinger-Strasse 57/409, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germanyallen@sowi.uni-kl.de
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Abstract

In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investigated the role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming. In both experiments, significant priming effects emerged only if prime and target were similar with regard to constituent order and also situated on the same level of embedding. We discuss our results on the basis of two current theoretical accounts of cross-linguistic priming, and conclude that neither an account based on combinatorial nodes nor an account assuming that constituent order is directly responsible for the priming effect can fully explain our data pattern. We suggest an account that explains cross-linguistic priming through a hierarchical tree representation. This representation is computed during processing of the prime, and can influence the formulation of a target sentence only when the structural features specified in it are grammatically correct in the target sentence.

Keywords

cross-linguistic structural primingconstituent orderlevel of embeddinghierarchical tree structures

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Footnotes

*

The research presented in this paper was supported by a startup research grant from the University of Kaiserslautern to Shanley Allen. The authors thank Mark Calley, Alina Kholodova, and Lisa Martinek, for valuable assistance with data collection, and Rob Hartsuiker, Holger Hopp, and the audience of the 2013 ‘Cross-linguistic Priming in Bilinguals: Perspectives and Constraints’ conference in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, for valuable comments on our results.

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