Bilingual Syntactic Representation And Processing Of Chinese Bilinguals

The mechanisms of bilingual syntactic representation and processing involve issues on how the two syntactic systems are represented in a bilingual's mind and what the mechanism of bilingual syntactic processing is in the process of bilingual sentence production. Although many studies have been conducted on the mechanisms of bilingual syntactic representation and processing, the concerning issues are to date far from being resolved. Meanwhile, most of the previous studies examined the related questions on bilingual speakers of Romance and Germanic languages. It is not clear whether the proposals already made can be applied to bilingual speakers with Chinese as the first language. Thus, it motivates us to explore the mechanisms of bilingual syntactic representation and processing of late unbalanced Chinese bilinguals with a series of experiments of cross-linguistic syntactic priming in the present dissertation.First, we designed three experiments to investigate the bilingual syntactic representation of late unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals. Experiment 1 was an experiment of cross-linguistic syntactic priming from Chinese to English. The results showed priming effect on passive structures. Experiment 2 was an experiment of cross-linguistic syntactic priming from English to Chinese. No priming effect was found on either active structures or passive structures. Finally, we conducted an experiment of syntactic priming within Chinese (Experiment 3). No priming effect was found on either active or passive structures within Chinese. We argued that, due to the different syntactic structures between Chinese and English as well as the asymmetric nature of the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) proficiency of the participants, the bilingual syntactic representations of the late unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals might be partially shared. Meanwhile, we suggested the L1 dominance account which argues that there may exist an interim stage of L1 dominance when L1 takes the dominant position and the L2 syntax is processed in virtue of L1 processing. As for the absence of priming effect within Chinese, we argued that there might exist some idiosyncratic features of syntax in Chinese. In addition, the cognitive processing in L1 is largely automatic so that the structure of the target sentences is not affected by that of the prime sentences.Since the bilingual syntactic representation of the late unbalanced bilinguals might not be fully integrated as found in Experiments 1 and 2, we designed two experiments to investigate how the bilingual syntactic representations develop. Results of Experiment 4 showed effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming from Chinese to English on both the double object (DO) and the prepositional object (PO) constructions. More importantly, the effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming increases while the L2 proficiency develops on the DO constructions. Experiment 5 triangulated the results of Experiment 4. Priming effect of passive sentences for both the less and the more proficient participants and the effect of L2 proficiency on the production of passive sentences were found. We argued that, at the initial stage of L2 learning, the L1 and the L2 structures might be separately represented. Along with the development of L2 proficiency, the L2 syntactic representation might be gradually integrated into the L1 representation. Further, no priming effect of active structures on both the less and the more proficient participants was found in Experiment 5. Since the English active is more commonly used than the passive, it was claimed that the findings supported the inverse-preference effect. That is, the more known or generally more preferred knowledge would be less likely to be learned, while the less known or generally less preferred knowledge would be more likely to be learned.In addition, we investigated the mechanisms of cross-linguistic syntactic priming. Specifically, we conducted Experiment 6 to testify the implicit learning account and the transient activation account. The results of the experiment showed a long-term effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming on the DO and the PO constructions under the same exposure condition. To our knowledge, the experiment is to date the only experiment that found the long-term effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming. The results also indicated that the proportions of targets produced were affected by the relative frequencies of exposure to it, which provided evidence to the accumulated priming effect. In addition, no lexical boost effect was found in the experiment. It was argued that the interaction of the implicit learning and the transient activation mechanisms might be responsible for the effect of syntactic priming. Last, the results of the experiment together with those of Experiment 4 lent support to the argument that there exist dative constructions and dative alteration in Chinese as those in English. It also confirmed the existence of psychological reality of Chinese DO and PO constructions.The last issue we examined is the process of grammatical encoding in bilingual syntactic processing. Specifically, we conducted two experiments of cross-linguistic syntactic priming between Chinese and German to investigate the role of word order in bilingual syntactic processing. The results showed priming effect from Chinese to German and a marginal priming effect from German to Chinese on active constructions. However, priming effect on passive constructions was not found in either direction. The results seemed to support the one-stage account, i.e., the functional and the positional assignments were achieved at a single stage during the process of grammatical encoding. We also argued that the process of bilingual syntactic processing and production seemed to rely more on the dominating language of a bilingual and the more preferred structure of the target language.We discussed the implications of the present study for linguistic and psycholinguistic theories as well as for language instruction practice at the end of the dissertation. Limitations and suggestions for future research were presented.