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Shared information structure: Evidence from cross-linguistic priming*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2012

ZUZANNA FLEISCHER ,
MARTIN J. PICKERING  and
JANET F. MCLEAN
ZUZANNA FLEISCHER*
Affiliation:
Adam Mickiewicz University
MARTIN J. PICKERING
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
JANET F. MCLEAN
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
Address for correspondence: Zuzanna Fleischer, School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Department of English Language Acquisition, al. Niepodległości 4, 61-874 Poznań, Poland[email protected]
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Abstract

This study asked whether bilinguals construct a language-independent level of information structure for the sentences that they produce. It reports an experiment in which a Polish–English bilingual and a confederate of the experimenter took turns to describe pictures to each other and to find those pictures in an array. The confederate produced a Polish active, passive, or conjoined noun phrase, or an active sentence with object–verb–subject order (OVS sentence). The participant responded in English, and tended to produce a passive sentence more often after a passive or an OVS sentence than after a conjoined noun phrase or active sentence. Passives and OVS sentences are syntactically unrelated but share information structure, in that both assign emphasis to the patient. We therefore argued that bilinguals construct a language-independent level of information structure during speech.

Keywords

information structurePolishprimingbilingualismlanguage production
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 568 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

This research was undertaken as part of an MSc awarded to the first author. The research was supported by ESRC grant RES-062-23-0376. We would like to thank Piotr Witkowski for acting as a confederate, and Roger van Gompel and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this paper

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