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Lexical activation of cross-language syntactic priming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2006

ANGELIKI SALAMOURA
Affiliation:
Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge
JOHN N. WILLIAMS
Affiliation:
Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge

Abstract

Cross-language (L1-to-L2) syntactic priming is the repetition of utterance structure from one language to another independently of meaning and has motivated models of language-shared representations of L1-L2 equivalent structures (Salamoura and Williams, submitted; Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker and Pickering, submitted). These models assume that the phenomenon is the result of residual activation of syntactic features encoding verb structural preferences and they, therefore, predict its initiation by a single verb prime (cf. Pickering and Branigan, 1998, for L1). This prediction was confirmed in a sentence completion task where we obtained syntactic priming from L1 Dutch to L2 English with Prepositional Object (PO) and Double Object (DO) datives upon presentation of single Dutch verbs that take either PO or DO only.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2006

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Footnotes

This research was supported by a Greek State Doctoral Scholarship (I.K.Y.) to A. Salamoura.