The production preferences and priming effects of Dutch passives in Arabic/Berber-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch heritage speakers

Abstract: Cross-linguistic structural priming effects suggest that bilinguals have shared or connected memory representations for similar syntactic structures. This predicts an influence of the production preferences of one language in the other language (Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2018). We hypothesized that shared structures will lead to a facilitatory effect on production frequencies, whereas connected structures may sometimes lead to an inhibitory effect due to competition between structures. We compared the production preferences and priming effects in Dutch for the frequent by-phrase-fin... Mehr ...

Verfasser: van Lieburg, Rianne
Hartsuiker, Robert
Bernolet, Sarah
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
Schlagwörter: Psychology / Linguistics
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-29447453
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://hdl.handle.net/10067/1952030151162165141

Abstract: Cross-linguistic structural priming effects suggest that bilinguals have shared or connected memory representations for similar syntactic structures. This predicts an influence of the production preferences of one language in the other language (Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2018). We hypothesized that shared structures will lead to a facilitatory effect on production frequencies, whereas connected structures may sometimes lead to an inhibitory effect due to competition between structures. We compared the production preferences and priming effects in Dutch for the frequent by-phrase-final and the uncommon by-phrase-medial passive between Arabic/Berber-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch heritage speakers and native speakers of Dutch. Arabic/Berber-Dutch speakers produced more agentless passives -that is, the alternative shared between their two languages. In contrast, Turkish-Dutch speakers produced less by-phrase-medial passives, although these are less uncommon in Turkish. This inhibition effect suggests that syntactic structures may sometimes be connected rather than shared, although the exact mechanisms behind the inhibitory effects require further research.