Cross-linguistic Syntactic Priming Of Passive Constructions In Chinese-English Bilinguals

Research on cross-linguistic syntactic priming is a promising tool to explore the mechanism of bilingual syntactic representations and processes which 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. The present paper investigated the cross-linguistic syntactic priming of passive constructions among Chinese-English bilinguals.42 Chinese bilingual students of different levels of English proficiencies participated in this experiment via a pictures-description task. The results showed that there was a clear cross-linguistic syntactic priming effect on passive structures from Chinese to English among participants of both mid-level and high-level English proficiency. It was also showed that both Chinese marked passive priming sentences and unmarked passive priming sentences can equally activate English target passive sentences. The findings indicate that word-order similarity is not necessary for the occurrence of cross-linguistic structural priming, supporting the view of the Two-stage Model of Language Production. That is to say, the occurrence of cross-linguistic structural priming is ascribed to the activation of the syntactic representation at verb-lexical layer instead of the effect of the prepositional priming. In addition, the study also found that, when the L2 proficiency reaches to a certain degree, it can affect the degree of cross-linguistic syntactic interaction. The effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming increases while the L2 proficiencies of the Chinese-English bilinguals develop. However, no priming effect was found on participants of low-level English proficiency in the present study. As for the absence of priming effect, I suggested A L1-Dominance-Phase which argues that there might be an interim stage of L1 dominance when L1 takes the dominant position and the syntactic processing of L2 relies on L1. Therefore, at the initial stage of L2 learning, the L1 and the L2 structures might be separately represented. Along with the development of the L2 proficiency, the L2 syntactic representation might be gradually integrated into the L1 representation. Finally, when the L2 and the L1 proficiencies become balanced, the L1 and the L2 syntactic representations are fully shared.