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Bilingual innovations: Experimental evidence offers clues regarding the psycholinguistics of language change
Abstract
Sustained interaction between a bilingual's two languages can be a first step toward diachronic language change. We describe two investigations that explore this by examining how bilinguals process innovative syntactic structures in their first language. In the first investigation, a sentence recall/sentence matching task, bilinguals and monolinguals exhibited differences in their tolerance of expressions of induced motion, which vary in acceptability between the two languages (Portuguese and English). In the second investigation, a priming methodology was employed to induce bilinguals to produce in their first language (Spanish) innovative constructions modeled on the second language (English), using materials where the alternation is shared between the two languages (voice, reciprocal) or not (dative). The two investigations provide a window into how languages interact in bilinguals, inducing tolerance of ungrammaticality which, we will argue, could lead to long-term novel representations in the linguistic competence repositories.
... In processing, they comprehend such structures easier and faster over time (Fine et al. 2013; highly dispreferred structure, after they heard structurally equivalent grammatical primes in Dutch. 3 In line with Fernández et al. (2017), bilinguals in the Netherlands produced more Dutch-like innovations in Papiamento than bilinguals in Aruba. ...
... 4 It is worth noting that innovative DOMs were, overall, more acceptable than ditransitives, probably due to the fact that HSs produce them and, hence, are more familiar with them (cf. Carando 2015;Fernández et al. 2017). Moreover, proficiency was found to modulate performance in ditransitive innovations, with advanced HSs behaving monolingual-like as opposed to their low-and intermediate-proficiency peers (in line with Montrul (2010Montrul ( , 2019; Guijarro-Fuentes and Marinis (2007) for L2 and Higby (2007) for 2L1 and L2, contradicting Regulez and Montrul (2023)). ...
... By including different structure types, we investigate whether this affects overall and trial-by-trial acceptability, as has been the case in previous studies on acceptability in other language pairs (e.g., Montrul and Bowles 2009;Montrul et al. 2015) and in studies on adaptation in acceptability (Snyder 2000for L1, Do et al. 2016. The choice of Canadian French was mainly motivated by previous work testing L2 adaptation to innovations in environments where the two languages of interest are either in high or low contact (e.g., Spanish-English in New York City and Córdoba in Fernández et al. (2017), Papiamento-Dutch the Netherlands and Aruba in Kootstra andŞahin 2018). The findings show that bilinguals in high-contact situations adapted to innovations in their production more than bilinguals in low-contact situations. ...
Bilinguals have been shown to adapt to syntactic innovations (i.e., structures that deviate from the standard grammar) either by producing such structures more or by processing them faster after repeated exposure. However, research on whether they adapt by increasing their acceptability ratings for innovations is limited. We consider this to be a crucial gap in the literature, since it could provide insights into how speakers adapt their perception for innovations that they might otherwise not adapt to in their production and/or processing. On this basis, the present study investigates overall acceptability and trial-by-trial acceptability (adaptation) for different types of innovations in Canadian French with grammatical structural equivalents in English. Structure type and individual differences in language experience (dominance, proficiency, exposure, etc.) are considered as factors that influence these processes, as previous research has shown that they play a role in the acceptability of innovations in bilinguals. For this purpose, we employed a timed acceptability judgment task (TAJT), where adult bilingual speakers of French and English in Canada were asked to rate innovative sentences in French and their standard (grammatical) counterparts as fast and spontaneously as possible. Both acceptability ratings (offline measure) and response times (RTs) (online measure) across trials were measured to test whether speakers show adaptation on both levels. Results revealed that innovations were rated lower and for most structure types slower than their standard counterparts, with the different types of innovations showing differences. Crucially, adaptation on a group level was reflected only in response times and not in acceptability ratings. On an individual level, though, some participants adapted their ratings, but not consistently across all innovation types. Moreover, ratings and RTs were influenced by individual language experience, with participants with a higher contact with French (higher French Score) being faster and less accepting of innovative sentences compared to participants with a lower contact with French.
... Recent models of contact-induced language change suggest that new forms are transferred in a recipient language due to the influence of a contact language (or source language) in cases of intense bilingualism. Such structures may be initially ungrammatical in the recipient language, but speakers become more tolerant of them based on counterparts that are grammatical in the source language (Fernández et al. 2017). Transferred forms exist in variation with native forms, and, over time, structures that are shared with the contact language become more frequent with increased exposure to and use of the contact language until they become part of the grammar of the recipient language (cf. ...
... Variants that are similar in the recipient language and the contact language become the preferred forms in the recipient language (Fernández et al. 2017). It is not clear however, whether the same holds in cases of trilingualism, such as in the case of the speakers surveyed in this dissertation, and if structural similarity between languages is a sufficient predictor for the locus of contact effects. ...
... These studies show that bilinguals establish correspondences between their languages, sometime even by resetting the realization of argument structure (i.e. Fernández et al. 2017). These findings fall in line with Matras' (2007Matras' ( , 2011 view on transfer as the separation between two subcomponents of a speaker's linguistic repertoire and the use of the same structures or categories across his/her languages. ...
A driving concern of this dissertation is to explore morpho-syntactic variation in Viscri Saxon, a dialect of Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax), originating in Viscri, Romania. I aim to determine if/how German and Romanian, the languages in contact with Viscri Saxon, affect the structure of the language. The two grammatical domains of Viscri Saxon under consideration are two-verb clusters, i.e. auxiliary/modal + verb constructions in the right periphery of a clause, and conjunctions.
If contact effects are observable, are some domains of Viscri Saxon morpho-syntax more affected by contact effects than others? Do German and Romanian affect Viscri Saxon to different degrees? Can contact effects on Viscri Saxon be identified by comparing a variety from Romania to a variety from Germany?
I address these questions by combining methods from language contact (focusing on factors that facilitate morpho-syntactic transfer) with methods from sociolinguistics (focusing on quantitative analyses that explore the effects of sociolinguistic factors on variation).
... This cross-language activation, which is assumed to be not under conscious control, is a prime example of language contact in the bilingual mind, and as such forms an important condition from which contact-induced language change can emerge, when this cross-language activation is sustained and continuous. Indeed, some first lines of evidence have recently emerged that indicate how patterns of cross-language activation in the minds of bilingual speakers are related to different patterns of linguistic choices made by speakers in language-contact settings compared to speakers not in language-contact settings (e.g., Fernández et al. 2017;Kootstra andŞahin 2018). ...
... Because structural priming also occurs between languages, the idea of structural priming as a mechanism of language change can of course also take place between languages, potentially leading to contact-induced language change (cf., Fernández et al. 2017;Loebell and Bock 2003;Kootstra and Doedens 2016;Kootstra and Muysken 2017;Kootstra andŞahin 2018;Travis et al. 2017). Contact-induced language change can be defined here as (probabilistic) differences in linguistic preferences between speakers that have been frequently using another language as well, compared to speakers that have not (e.g., Dogruöz and Backus 2009;Indefrey et al. 2017;Moro and Klamer 2015;Otheguy et al. 2007;Villerius 2019). ...
... Contact-induced language change can be defined here as (probabilistic) differences in linguistic preferences between speakers that have been frequently using another language as well, compared to speakers that have not (e.g., Dogruöz and Backus 2009;Indefrey et al. 2017;Moro and Klamer 2015;Otheguy et al. 2007;Villerius 2019). Indeed, consistent with the hypothesized link between contact-induced change and cross-linguistic priming, Fernández et al. (2017) observed that Spanish-English bilinguals were more tolerant than monolinguals in their judgments of L1 language structures that contained innovations from their L2, and that these results could be linked to other results in this population of bilinguals, in which they observed priming of innovative language use across languages. Related results were found by Travis et al. (2017;see also Torres Cacoullos and Travis 2010), who studied the production of first-person subject pronouns in a bilingual corpus of Spanish-English bilinguals from New Mexico, which are always produced in English but can either be dropped or overtly produced in Spanish. ...
This paper focuses on structural priming, levels of awareness, and agency in contact-induced language change, bringing insights from historical and anthropological linguistics together with psycholinguistic, processing-based approaches. We begin with a discussion of the relation between levels of awareness and agency in the linguistic literature, focusing on the work of Von Humboldt, Silverstein, Van Coetsem, and Trudgill. Then we turn to the psycholinguistic notion of structural priming, aiming to show that cross-linguistic structural priming is a plausible mechanism driving contact-induced language change, and explore the properties of priming and its relation to the levels of awareness discussion in the linguistic literature. We end with suggestions for future research to further elucidate the relation between structural priming, levels of awareness, and agency in contact-induced language change.
... It has been argued to drive fluency in communication (e.g., Pickering and Garrod 2004), implicit language learning (e.g., Chang et al. 2006;Dell and Chang 2014), and even language change (e.g., Loebell and Bock 2003;Jaeger and Rosenbach 2008;Pickering and Garrod 2017). Based on these functions, structural priming has recently been proposed to be a possible driving mechanism of contact-induced language change in bilinguals (e.g., Fernández et al. 2017;Kootstra and Muysken 2017;Kootstra and Şahin in press). ...
... Contact-induced change occurs in contexts in which more than one language is spoken. To the best of our knowledge, only a handful of studies has investigated crosslanguage structural priming in relation to contact-induced change (e.g., Fernández et al. 2017;Kootstra and Şahin in press;Travis 2011, 2016). ...
... We share the implicit learning account's view of structural priming as a mechanism of bilingual language use and interpret the cross-language priming effect we observed as a potential factor driving language change. Thus, from this perspective, the results obtained in the current study are consistent with recently formulated accounts that view (cross-language) structural priming as a potential mechanism underlying (contact-induced) language change (Fernández et al. 2017;Jäger and Rosenbach 2008;Kootstra and Doedens 2016;Kootstra and Şahin in press;Pickering and Garrod 2017;Travis et al. 2017). As a psycholinguistic mechanism, structural priming may be increasing the chance with which structural change in contact settings occurs. ...
Subject pronoun expression has been extensively studied for effects of language contact, but it is fairly recent that these studies started including cross-language structural priming paradigms. The earlier studies on subject pronoun use in Turkish spoken by Turkish-Dutch bilinguals did not find any difference from monolingual speakers of Turkish but reported a few instances of unconventional use of subject pronouns, indicating the influence of Dutch on Turkish. This study aimed to determine whether structural priming may have a part in the unconventional variation observed in subject pronoun use in Turkish in contact with Dutch. Twenty-eight Turkish-Dutch bilinguals listened to short stories and responded to subsequently presented instructive sentences. These sentences were prime sentences, which contained either an overt or a null subject pronoun. Priming effects were investigated in monolingual and bilingual settings by presenting the stories in Turkish in the former and in Dutch in the latter. Results yielded a higher likelihood of using overt subject pronouns in the bilingual than in the monolingual setting following a prime sentence with an overt rather than a null pronoun. Our findings, which are based on a structure and a language that have not yet been studied much in relation to structural priming (i.e., subject pronoun use in Turkish), strengthen the empirical basis of how structural priming influences syntactic choices in language contact settings.
... These findings are in line with the findings reported in Souza (2014), Fernández et al. (2016) and Fernández & Souza (2017). These studies document observations of BP-English bilinguals with high L2 proficiency exhibiting higher tolerance in L1, as compared to BP monolinguals, for an L2-specific argument structure, namely the induced movement alternation (ex: the researcher ran the mouse through the maze). ...
... More specifically, the aforementioned studies report experiments that suggest that these bilinguals not only process the induced movement alternation faster than monolinguals do, but they also produce this construction more often than monolinguals do, notwithstanding its ungrammaticality in BP. Due to the fact that this cross-linguistic influence was observed both in processing and in production, Fernández & Souza (2017) hypothesized that this phenomenon might not be restricted to a temporary and highly localized processing gap. We will test this hypothesis in our next experiments. ...
... As we mentioned in the previous section, Fernández et al. (2017) predicted that L2-to-L1 influence is probably not restricted to a temporary and highly localized processing gap. This prediction is based on the fact that this phenomenon was observed both in comprehension and in production of the induced movement alternation. ...
This study aims to investigate L2-to-L1 cross-linguistic influence on bilinguals’ representation and processing with three psycholinguistics tasks. The interest in this type of effect lies in its possible association with cognitive control development. Our study focuses on possible influences of the non-dominant language on the dominant language: we analyzed whether highly proficient Brazilian Portuguese-English late bilinguals immersed in the L1 context behaved differently from Brazilian Portuguese monolinguals in regards to sentences in the L1 that simulated an L2-specific construction (true resultative). We conducted a maze task in order to analyze the speakers’ linguistic processing and a speeded acceptability judgment task in order to analyze their linguistic representation. We also observed participants’ behavior towards a construction available in both languages (depictive). The overall results indicate that bilinguals processed both constructions faster than monolinguals, but the difference between the groups was significantly larger towards the true resultative construction. However, there was no significant difference between the groups in relation to how they perceived the acceptability of both constructions. We interpret the results as evidence that the L2 influence on the L1 occurs during real time sentence processing, but it does not result in changes in the overall L1 representation.
... One of the experiments employed an online processing task, and the other employed a timed grammaticality judgment task. In Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, Belo Horizonte, v.25, n.3, p.1685-1716, 2017 1686 our tasks, sentences in Brazilian Portuguese that emulated the linguistic behavior of the English resultative construction were the target items. We report results that show a mismatch in the observations yielded by the two task types, with only the online processing task revealing apparent L2 effects on performance in the L1. ...
... Cross-linguistic interactions have been show to emerge among high L2 proficiency bilinguals in the form of higher tolerance for argument structure constructions that would be either rejected or processed with much difficulty by monolinguals. Fernández and Souza (2016), as well as Souza (2014) and Fernández, Souza and Carando (2017), have documented observations of this phenomenon employing tasks that deal with language processing in comprehension and production. Such observations have led the authors to hypothesize that the phenomenon is not restricted to a temporary and highly localized processing lapse. ...
... Rather, the authors argue that bilinguals exhibit a certain degree of innovation in their overall linguistic representations, that is, in their overall linguistic competence in both L1 and L2. Fernández, Souza and Carando (2017) propose that such bilingual innovations might be one of the psycholinguistic mechanisms behind long-term, gradual contact-induced language change. But in a study that employed a timed grammaticality judgment task, Souza, Soares-Silva and Silva (2016) did not replicate a similar heightened tolerance for L2-like argument structure constructions in the L1 with a pool of equally high L2 proficiency Brazilian-Portuguese English bilinguals. ...
Estudos experimentais em Linguística apoiam-se em dados oriundos de desempenho de participantes em tarefas linguísticas. Portanto, a compreensão dos construtos abordados por tais tarefas é fundamental para a interpretação dos resultados gerados pelo trabalho experimental. Neste estudo, explora-se questões trazidas por um estudo previamente publicado baseado em uma tarefa de julgamento de gramaticalidade temporizada que não replicou evidências anteriormente relatadas acerca de efeitos de interações translinguísticas no processamento bilíngue de construções de estrutura argumental que não fazem parte do repertório construcional da L1 dos bilíngues. Apesar da tarefa de julgamento de gramaticalidade temporizada ter sido defendida como uma medida válida de conhecimento linguístico implícito, resenha-se estudos psicométricos recentes que põem este pressuposto em dúvida, ao mostrar que tal tarefa ou não captura conhecimento implícito, ou não o captura tão completamente quanto o fazem tarefas psicolinguísticas de processamento online. Neste estudo, conduz-se dois experimentos com a mesma amostra de sujeitos. Um dos experimentos empregou uma tarefa de processamento online, e o outro empregou uma tarefa de julgamento de gramaticalidade temporizada. Nessas tarefas, sentenças em português do Brasil que emulavam o comportamento linguístico da construção resultativa do inglês constituíram os itens alvo. Relata-se resultados que mostram a discrepância de observações geradas pelos dois tipos de tarefa, com somente a tarefa de processamento online revelando os aparentes efeitos da L2 sobre o desempenho linguístico da L1. Interpreta-se os resultados como sugestivos de que o local das interações translinguísticas de bilíngues é majoritariamente nos processos implícitos.
... Baptista et al. 2014, Jacob et al. 2017, and such effects could occur in the way frequency distributions of forms that are in variation are affected. Variants that are similar in the recipient language and the contact language may become the preferred forms in the recipient language (Fernández et al. 2017). Based on these assumptions, I expect German-dominant speakers of TrSax to show a preference for German-like structures and Romanian-dominant speakers to show a preference for Romanian-like constructions in both areas that display variation in TrSax, if variation is indeed the result of transfer. ...
... Comparing data from a high-contact variety of a target language to data from a lowcontact variety has the potential to provide a clearer account of the effects contact languages can have on a target language (cf. Fernández et al. 2017, Kootstra & Şahin 2018, but also shed light on features that remain stable in contact situations. More explicitly, by comparing data from TrSax speakers in Germany to data from TrSax speakers in Romania can help identify features that are different between the two TrSax varieties, and assess whether such features can be attributed to potential contact effects from German and Romanian. ...
In this article, I report on two analyses of variation in Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax), an endangered Germanic language in contact with German and Romanian, used in settings predictive of structural influences among languages. My goals are to document the structural properties of the target variables and to evaluate if processes of language contact have an effect on synchronic variation in TrSax. I identified two areas of TrSax that display variation at the morphosyntactic level, and in each case one of the variants has a corresponding structure in German, while the other variant has a corresponding structure in Romanian. To tease apart contact-induced variation from internally motivated variation, I compare data from multilingual speakers with different linguistic profiles and assess the effect of sociolinguistic factors on variation through mixed effects analyses. Variation that patterns similarly across these two groups can provide a clearer account of the structure of TrSax, while differences between the groups can shed light on trajectories of change in TrSax. Furthermore, results of this study have implications for borrowing hierarchies in language contact.
... Based on the findings from the previous section, we hypothesize that crosslinguistic priming may be a mechanism of contact-induced language change. The idea is as follows: when crosslinguistic structural priming takes place continuously in real-life discourse and involves learning, as has been found, it is not unlikely that cumulative structural priming effects from one language to the other lead to subtle changes in the frequencies with which certain structures or constructions are used (see also Fernández et al. 2017, Hartsuiker 2013, Loebell & Bock 2003. ...
... Now when such priming takes places across languages, it can be hypothesized that crosslinguistic priming may well serve as a psycholinguistically plausible mechanism capturing the microprocesses of contact-induced language change (cf. Fernández et al. 2017, Hartsuiker 2013, Kootstra & Doedens 2016, Kootstra & Muysken 2017, Loebell & Bock 2003, Muysken 2013. The goal of the present study is to explore whether this is indeed the case. ...
Studies on language contact suggest that cross-language interactions in individual language use may lead to contact-induced change at the community level. We propose that the phenomenon of crosslinguistic structural priming may well drive this process. We investigated this by focusing on dative sentence production by Papiamento speakers in Aruba and in the Netherlands. In experiment 1, Papiamento speakers in Aruba and in the Netherlands described dative events. The speakers in the Netherlands produced more Dutch-like structures than the speakers in Aruba, especially younger speakers. In experiment 2, speakers from the same populations heard a Dutch prime sentence before describing a dative event in Papiamento. Syntactic choices were influenced by the Dutch prime sentences, and, again, especially younger speakers in the Netherlands produced more Dutch-like dative structures. This combination of results suggests that Papiamento syntactic preferences in the Netherlands are changing as a function of contact with Dutch, and that crosslinguistic structural priming is a likely mechanism underlying this change.
... It is plausible to hypothesize that under a condition of processing complexity (e.g., integration of information from different domains or cognitive load) the system is more tolerant to transfer. For instance, it might not identify the ungrammaticality/inappropriateness of a certain string in one language, which is grammatical/appropriate in the other language (see Fernández et al. 2017 for discussion on this point). Moreover, the literature has shown that other factors (beyond processing and transfer) must be involved in bilingual language production. ...
... While it seems uncontroversial that dominance affects processing positively (Langacker 1990;Lanza 2000;Pliatsikas and Marinis 2013), the role of dominance in language transfer is still not clear. Some scholars attribute the emergence of cross-linguistic structures to dominance (Bernardini 2003;Nicoladis 2006;Yip and Matthews 2000), while others claim that transfer is an effect of bilingualism, independently of dominance (Fernández et al. 2017;Hsin et al. 2013;Müller and Hulk 2001). 1 Language contact in bilingualism has often been considered as a trigger for language change (cf. Meisel 2011), since it may lead to the emergence of innovative form-function mappings or accelerate language change processes that are also attested (albeit at a much slower rate) in non-contact situations (Silva-Corvalán 1994). ...
This paper intends to test different accounts of bilingual reference production against the production of referring expressions in Italian by German‒Italian bilingual adolescents. In particular, we investigate to what extent bilingual referring expressions involve transfer from one language to the other, result from processing and dominance variables, and are the outcome of a process of language change. We will show that each of these hypotheses makes a precise prediction about which referential strategy bilinguals should adopt. The production of referring expressions is examined in the context of a story-telling task. Based on the analysis of overspecified forms, clitic omissions, and agreement mismatches, as well as on correlations with dominance factors, we argue in favor of the relevance of dominance and processing factors for bilingual reference production. Finally, we verify the possibility of generalizing our conclusions to a different linguistic domain, concerning the expression of word order in main clauses.
... Based on the findings from the previous section, we hypothesize that crosslinguistic priming may be a mechanism of contact-induced language change. The idea is as follows: when crosslinguistic structural priming takes place continuously in real-life discourse and involves learning, as has been found, it is not unlikely that cumulative structural priming effects from one language to the other lead to subtle changes in the frequencies with which certain structures or constructions are used (see also Fernández et al. 2017, Hartsuiker 2013, Loebell & Bock 2003. ...
... Now when such priming takes places across languages, it can be hypothesized that crosslinguistic priming may well serve as a psycholinguistically plausible mechanism capturing the microprocesses of contact-induced language change (cf. Fernández et al. 2017, Hartsuiker 2013, Kootstra & Doedens 2016, Kootstra & Muysken 2017, Loebell & Bock 2003, Muysken 2013. The goal of the present study is to explore whether this is indeed the case. ...
... However, this could be extended to a full theory of language contact, by taking into account the interaction between the languages in the bilingual brain of the speaker and the priming effects that could take place there. There is ev-idence from psycholinguistics that cross-language priming, in which linguistic items in one language prime items in the other language (Loebell & Bock, 2003), can lead to language change in contact settings (Adamou et al., 2021;Fernández, De Souza, & Carando, 2017;Kootstra & Doedens, 2016;Kootstra & Şahin, 2018;Travis et al., 2017). In such a theory, in addition to spreading change, priming mechanisms (in a more general sense than conversational priming) could also lead to the introduction of changes in a language contact setting. ...
In this thesis, I study how languages change in situations where languages or groups of speakers are in contact with each other. As language change is inherently caused by interaction between individuals, I use a technique from multi-agent Artificial Intelligence (AI) that puts the interaction of individuals central: agent-based computer simulations. I apply these agent-based models to specific case studies of language change in the real world. The goal of the thesis is two-fold: getting a better view of the mechanisms behind language change and studying how computational methods work on real-world problems with small amounts of data. I present three different computer models, which each answer a particular linguistic question given a specific case study or dataset.
In my first model, I study how language contact can make languages simplify, using a case study of Alorese, a language in Eastern Indonesia. By integrating data from the language into an agent-based model, I study if the phonotactics of the language -- the allowed structure of sounds following each other -- could play a role in simplification. In my second model, I investigate if mechanisms in conversations could be a factor in language change. Using an agent-based model, I show how speakers influencing each other's linguistic choices in conversations can under certain circumstances, lead to spread of an innovative form In my third model, I investigate what could be a cognitively realistic computer model for the `brain' of the speakers, that could be used in an agent-based simulation. I develop a neural network model, based on a technique called Adaptive Resonance Theory, which has as its task to cluster verbs that conjugate in the same way into groups. The model is able to learn the systems of verbs of languages from different families while being interpretable: it is possible to visualise to which parts of the words the network attends.
Together, the three models show how different mechanisms that interact with each other can lead to language change when languages are in contact. The models show how mechanisms working on short timescales, such as on the scale of a conversation, can cause effects in the longer term, leading to language change. At the same time, this thesis gives insights for the development of communication in multi-agent AI systems, especially when there are multiple types of agents, as is the case in language contact situations.
... It exists on a continuum of skills and abilities where multilinguals use each of their languages for different purposes depending on personal, social, and/or situational needs for communicative purposes. A bilingual person is not the combination of two monolinguals; rather their languages are integrated in the mind and the implicit grammar rules of these languages are, at least in part, shared (Fernández, Souza & Carando, 2016). The productive representation of these two shared systems manifests when bilinguals code-switch or produce words, phrases, or sentences in more than one language within one context or conversation (García & Kleifgen, 2019). ...
Growing numbers of children in the U.S. communicate in a language other than English at home. Yet, schools are underprepared to accurately assess students' language and literacy skills in English and other languages. Looking at the issue from a translanguaging perspective (García, 2009; García, 2020; Acenzi-Moreno, 2018), our research seeks to address the literacy and greater educational needs of the school-age bilingual and multilingual population. Data were collected through semi-structured field interviews regarding: (1) the ways schools identify and place English learners into appropriate programs, specifically considering how new technologies can be introduced to improve this process, and (2) the types of bilingual programs, curricula, and materials that are available to meet their needs. Our findings from interviews showed that while all states had bilingual programs and materials, there was a dearth of precise multilingual assessments, and there was inadequate access to assessment technology suitable for young bilingual and multilingual learners.
... More specifically, these results suggest that frequent exposure to a structure in Language A may prime the structure for use in Language Alpha, even if said structure is not available in Language Alpha. Such long-term between-language priming may lead to qualitative differences in language use between bilingual and monolingual children (e.g., Strik & Pérez-Leroux, 2011) and has more generally been proposed as a driving force in contactinduced language change (Fernández et al., 2017). ...
After hearing a structure in one language, bilinguals are more likely to produce the same structure in their other language. Such between-language priming is often interpreted as evidence for shared syntactic representations between a bilingual’s two languages and is positively related to proficiency. Recently, shared syntactic structures and structural priming have been invoked to explain cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children. This paper examines the relation between cross-linguistic influence, between-language priming and language proficiency. Almost all studies on between-language priming have focussed on grammatical structures. However, cross-linguistic influence has also been found to result in ungrammatical structures. In this study, we investigated whether ungrammatical adjective placement can be primed from a Germanic language to a Romance language and vice versa, and how to best account for any such priming. Furthermore, we examined the role of proficiency in explaining priming effects and whether this fits with an error-based learning account. Our results show that it is possible to prime ungrammatical structures, that this is lexically constrained, and that it is more likely to occur at lower levels of proficiency. We argue that the same mechanisms underlying grammatical priming can also explain our findings of ungrammatical priming.
... For example, Spanish-English bilinguals who are English dominant or have had extensive exposure to English are more likely to demonstrate relative-clause attachment preferences that align more with English monolinguals than Spanish monolinguals (Dussias & Sagarra, 2007;Fernández, 2003). Additionally, highly proficient bilinguals can process ungrammatical constructions that are grammatical in the other language better than monolinguals and less proficient bilinguals (Fernández et al., 2017). By gaining knowledge of this syntactic structure and its semantic interpretations in English, these bilinguals presumably draw on the rich linguistic knowledge available to them from both languages to help them make sense of similar constructions. ...
Recent years have seen an increased interest in the study of heritage language bilinguals. However, much of the research on heritage bilingualism is fraught with deficit framing. In this article, we demonstrate how many of the assumptions that underlie this growing field of research and the way that heritage speakers are positioned as research subjects reveal ideologies that center and value monolingualism and whiteness. We problematize a number of ways in which these ideologies commonly show up in the frameworks and methodologies used in psycholinguistics to study this population. We advocate for frameworks such as usage-based linguistics and multicompetence that center the multidimensional experiences of bilinguals and embrace nuance and complexity. We call on the research community to examine their research designs and theories to dismantle the systems that maintain heritage bilingualism at the margins of bilingualism research.
... For the purposes of the present study, it should be noted that some scholars establish a strong relationship between language dominance -and the occurrence of cross-linguistic effects (Bernardini, 2003;Nicoladis, 2006;Torregrossa et al., 2021;Yip & Matthews, 2000), while others do not (Fernández et al., 2017;Hsin et al., 2013;Müller & Hulk, 2001). However, it is also possible that the effect of dominance is modulated by age. ...
The present study analyses written narratives of 60 Portuguese-German bilingual children between 8 and 15 years living in Switzerland, in both their languages. Portuguese is the children’s heritage language (HL) and German the environmental language. The analysis focusses on the children’s lexical, morphological and structural knowledge in the verb domain (verb types, agreement morphology, verbal tense, word order within the VP, orthography) and aims to determine the role of language dominance, general proficiency, current age and age of onset of bilingualism (AoO) in bilingual language acquisition at later stages of development (i.e., at school-age). The results show that the bilingual children display stable syntactic and morphological knowledge in both their languages. Lexical knowledge is positively correlated with age and proficiency. Morphological and syntactic deviations are residual in both languages and not correlated with AoO. No effects of cross-linguistic influence are observed. We only find performance differences between the Portuguese and the German corpus at the level of orthography. We conclude that in the analysed age span children have received enough exposure to both languages to develop stable morphological and syntactic knowledge, at least in the verb domain.
... More specifically, these results suggest that frequent exposure to a structure in Language A may prime the structure for use in Language Alpha, even if said structure is not available in Language Alpha. Such long-term between-language priming may lead to qualitative differences in language use between bilingual and monolingual children (e.g., Strik & Pérez-Leroux, 2011) and has more generally been proposed as a driving force in contact-induced language change (Fernández, et al., 2017). ...
Bilinguals are often considered to develop shared syntactic representations between their languages. Evidence for shared syntax typically comes from between-language priming studies showing that exposure to a structure in a bilingual’s one language can prime the subsequent use of the same structure in the other language. In turn, between-language priming of shared structures can have long-term consequences, explaining an intensively studied phenomenon in the field of bilingualism: cross-linguistic influence. Virtually all available studies on between-language priming have focussed on structures that are present in both languages of the bilingual population tested. However, cross-linguistic influence has been found to result in ungrammatical structures as well. In this study, we investigated whether it is possible to prime ungrammatical adjective placement between a Romance language (French and Spanish) and a Germanic language (Dutch) in Spanish-Dutch and French-Dutch bilingual children. In addition, we studied the effect of language proficiency on the strength of such between-language priming. Finally, we tested whether priming of ungrammatical structures is the result of shared or separate-but-connected syntactic representations. Our results show between-language priming of ungrammatical adjective placement from Spanish and French into Dutch. The lower children’s proficiency in their languages, the stronger the priming effect was. These findings follow the proposal that between-language priming can account for cross-linguistic influence, including ungrammatical structures. Furthermore, we believe our results of ungrammatical priming are best explained by separate-but-connected syntactic structures.
... Other research areas, such as second language acquisition (SLA) (i.e. Mitchell et al., 2013) and psycholinguistics (i.e., Fernández et al., 2017), also investigate English nonnative speakers' production (oral/written). ...
Corpus compilation is a challenging research endeavor that many researchers decide to pursue. Few learner corpora, however, can be easily accessed (e.g.,the International Corpus of Learner English), and none of them carry a variety of text registers written by English learners at different proficiency levels studying in the Brazilian university context. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present the compilation of a learner corpus, much needed in our research and teaching context, pointing out the advantages of building this type of corpus for the understanding of learners’ needs as well as for pedagogical decision-making based on sound data. Presenting a detailed rationale of the corpus compilation, this article reveals the various decisions made in order to guarantee that fair comparisons can be made. To exemplify the value of building a carefully designed corpus, results of previous studies are compared. Some of the conclusions reached refer to the need for discipline-specific tasks to propel writing proficiency and for authorship skills to be developed in English for Academic Purposes classes to foster academic success.
Keywords:
learner corpus; academic writing; EAP; corpus linguistics
... Accessed onJune, 22, 2020. 12 Other research areas, such as second language acquisition (SLA) (i.e.Mitchell et al., 2013) and psycholinguistics (i.e.,Fernández et al., 2017), also investigate English non-native speakers' production (oral/written). ...
Corpus compilation is a challenging research endeavor that many researchers decide to pursue. Few learner corpora, however, can be easily accessed (e.g.,the International Corpus of Learner English), and none of them carry a variety of text registers written by English learners at different proficiency levels studying in the Brazilian university context. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present the compilation of a learner corpus, much needed in our research and teaching context, pointing out the advantages of building this type of corpus for the understanding of learners’ needs as well as for pedagogical decision-making based on sound data. Presenting a detailed rationale of the corpus compilation, this article reveals the various decisions made in order to guarantee that fair comparisons can be made. To exemplify the value of building a carefully designed corpus, results of previous studies are compared. Some of the conclusions reached refer to the need for discipline-specific tasks to propel writing proficiency and for authorship skills to be developed in English for Academic Purposes classes to foster academic success.
... If this is the case, the French motion system may be undergoing a typological shift towards a system allowing more systematic encoding of path information via satellites. Although necessarily speculative, this suggestion is compatible with recent claims in the literature that bilingual speakers are potential agents of language change (Fernández, De Souza & Carando, 2017;Kootstra & Muysken, 2017;Meisel, 2011b). Alternatively, French may simply be less straightforwardly V-framing than is generally acknowledged, which would lend support to arguments in the literature in favour of classifying French as a mixed or hybrid system (Kopecka, 2006;Pourcel & Kopecka, 2005). ...
Simultaneous bilingual children sometimes display crosslinguistic influence (CLI), widely attested in the domain of morphosyntax. It remains less clear whether CLI affects bilinguals’ event construal, what motivates its occurrence and directionality, and how developmentally persistent it is. The present study tested predictions generated by the structural overlap hypothesis and the co-activation account in the motion event domain. 96 English–French bilingual children of two age groups and 96 age-matched monolingual English and French controls were asked to describe animated videos displaying voluntary motion events. Semantic encoding in main verbs showed bidirectional CLI. Unidirectional CLI affected French path encoding in the verbal periphery and was predicted by the presence of boundary-crossing, despite the absence of structural overlap. Furthermore, CLI increased developmentally in the French data. It is argued that these findings reflect highly dynamic co-activation patterns sensitive to the requirements of the task and to language-specific challenges in the online production process.
... For instance, CASP for Bilingualism predicts that bilinguals would aim to Maximise Common Ground and Maximise Efficiency in Communication by having information required by both systems available on-line even when speaking just one. Maximise Common Ground is a CASP principle that comprises what has commonly been labelled in the previous literature as either positive or negative transfer, but here they are treated as products of the same mechanism because both have the same background motivation, that of using something that works in both languages (Dussias, 2001(Dussias, , 2003Dussias & Sagarra, 2007;Fernandez, 2002;Fernandez et al., 2017); Nicol et al., 2001;Nicoladis, 2002Nicoladis, , 2006. The CASP principle of Maximise Efficiency in Communication captures the gist of bilingual efficiency: being multi-language ready and prepared to produce and adjust output in either language at any moment (Filipović, 2014(Filipović, , 2019see Filipović and Hawkins, 2019, for further details and exemplifications of these and the other CASP for Bilingualism principles). ...
Aims and objectives/purpose/research question
This research probes for language effects on witness memory in bilingual speakers whose languages are typologically distinct, English and Spanish. The key question is whether speakers’ memory for agentive motion events is influenced by first language (L1) or second language (L2) patterns, or both, when the L2 is used for descriptions.
Design/methodology/approach
Four groups were tested in an event verbalisation and recognition memory task: English monolinguals, Spanish monolinguals, Late L1 English/L2 Spanish bilinguals and late L1 Spanish/L2 English bilinguals. The video stimuli depicted complex motion events (three manners of motion per event) because complex rather than simple events have been shown to elicit language effects.
Data and analysis
The data for analyses include (a) the number of mentions and the type of detail included in the verbalisation of the manner of motion (the key typological difference) and (b) recognition error rates in the memory task. Recognition errors occurred when the pairs of target videos were deemed the same while in fact they were not.
Findings/conclusions
Speaking in a L2 that makes it difficult to verbalise a component of an event (manner of motion) can have a negative effect on the memory for that specific component in L2 speakers, while at the same time benefiting memory for some other event features.
Originality
This work shows, for the first time, negative effects of a L2 on memory for motion events and offers a hitherto elusive explanation and theoretical justification for the reasons when and why we do, or do not, get beneficial effects on memory in bilinguals.
Significance/implications
The findings contribute to understanding of the effects of late (adult L2) acquisition on cognition. They support predictions of the Complex Adaptive System Principles (CASP) for Bilingualism model, advocating fine-grained typological approaches to lexicalisation of cognitive domains and explicit teaching of typological differences that affect information content.
... Participants had ten minutes to do the test. he VLT classiies the participants into 5 diferent levels and, similarly to previous studies (Fernández, Souza & Carando, 2017;Fontoura, 2018;Oliveira, 2016;Penzin, 2018;Souza & Oliveira, 2014), we considered level 3 low proiciency and level 5 high proiciency. he eiciency of the VLT in separating high proiciency from low proiciency bilinguals has been attested by . he authors determined that a low proiciency bilingual, that is, a person who has limited knowledge of English, is able to recognize the ivethousand most frequent words in the language, whereas high proiciency speakers would possess the vocabulary akin to ten-thousand most frequent words. ...
This study aims to add to the body of evidence regarding the linguistic structures that seem to be more challenging in L2 acquisition than in L1 acquisition (DeKeyser, 2005; Ellis, 2008; Inagaki, 2001; Slabakova, 2014; Sorace, 2011). The Negative Evidence Hypothesis (NEH) (AUTHOR) predicts that bilinguals are less sensitive than native speakers to violations resulted from the overgeneralization of an L2-specific rule. We tested this hypothesis by analyzing the behavior of Brazilian Portuguese-English bilinguals with different profiles towards double-object construction with unlicensed verbs in two acceptability judgment tasks. The results corroborate the NEH by conveying that bilinguals gain sensitivity as they become more proficient, yet, the data suggests that not even when immersed in the L2, they become as sensitive as native speakers.
... The other four papers in this issue present empirical findings on various aspects of priming in bilinguals. Fernández, de Souza, and Carando (2017) bring together two experimental studies on the processing and primed production of contact-induced innovative language structures in Portuguese-English and Spanish-English bilinguals. They show how bilinguals can become tolerant to innovative structures in their first language on the basis of experience with such structures in their second language (via priming). ...
This special issue deals with cross-linguistic priming in bilinguals, and consists of six contributions, which were all presented during the workshop on cross-linguistic priming in bilinguals at Radboud University Nijmegen (NL) in September 2013 ( http://crosslingprimingconf2013.wordpress.com ).
The language of heritage speakers is characterized by variability and structural innovations compared to the baseline grammar of first-generation immigrants. Although many factors contribute to these differences, this study considers structural priming with structures that do not exist in the majority language as a potential mechanism for language change. The linguistic focus is accusative clitic doubling, which exists in some Spanish varieties, but which is unacceptable in others. Our research examined how flexible heritage speakers’ grammars are compared to baseline speakers, and to what extent heritage speakers adopt structures attested in the diachronic development and in other varieties of their heritage language. In two studies, we tested the acceptability of accusative clitic doubling and primed accusative clitic doubling in oral production. Results showed that heritage speakers of Spanish are somewhat accepting of innovative structures and more sensitive to structural priming compared to baseline speakers, who are generally not.
This volume connects the latest research on language acquisition across the lifespan with the explanation of language change in specific sociohistorical settings. This conversation benefits from recent advances in two areas: on the one hand, the study of how learners of various ages and in various sociolinguistic contexts acquire language variation; on the other, historical sociolinguistics as the field that focuses on the study of historical patterns of language variation and change. The overarching rationale for this interdisciplinary dialogue is that all forms of language change start and spread as the result of individual acts of acquisition throughout the speakers’ lives. The thirteen chapters in this book are authored by an international group of both established and emerging scholars. They encompass theoretical overviews of specific research areas within the broader realm of the acquisition of language variation, as well as case studies applying these theoretical advances to the exploration of language change in a wide range of sociohistorical contexts in the Americas, Oceania, and Asia. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers in the area of language acquisition, language variation and language change, especially those working on interdisciplinary and crosslinguistic connections among these areas.
This special issue focuses on the interaction of the disciplines of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics to obtain new insights into which cognitive factors are potentially relevant for language change. The contributions address questions related to the cognitive mechanisms at play, their evidence in historical data, who the agents of change may be, which experimental methods can be implemented to investigate language change, and how language change can be theoretically modeled in terms of cognitive mechanisms. In this introductory article, we first outline our aims by describing the call for papers and the workshop which laid the foundation for this special issue. We then provide a state of the art on the integration of research on cognitive mechanisms and language change before introducing the contributions and listing which of the central questions they address.
Syntactic priming is a naturally-occurring psycholinguistic phenomenon that has been used as an experimental manipulation to great effect: over the last 20 years, syntactic priming research with children of different backgrounds has added to our understanding of the mechanisms and stages of syntactic development and priming. This collection of original articles explores the state of the art in that literature. Ten chapters review the findings of syntactic priming research with monolingual and multilingual, typically-developing and atypically-developing child populations from a variety of language backgrounds. The expert authors explore what syntactic priming has revealed about children’s development of syntax and propose ways in which methodological innovations and broadening the scope of future research can build on this. The collection will be a useful resource for researchers from diverse areas of the field of child language, particularly those with a focus on grammatical development.
We investigated how bilingual speakers process evidentiality information in a dual language activation setting (Green & Abutalebi, 2013) using a translation production and confidence judgment task. Due to interaction of multiple factors in bilingual processing a multifactor model CASP ( Complex Adaptive System Principles ) for Bilingualism (Filipović & Hawkins, 2019) was used as a theoretical frame. Evidentiality indicates the source of information about past events, i.e., whether they were witnessed firsthand or non-firsthand and it is marked obligatorily in the grammar of Turkish and optionally in English using verbs, adverbs or constructions. The results show that firsthand information is translated more correctly than the non-firsthand in both directions and that different bilingual populations all gravitate towards a shared pattern in both languages but in different ways due to the different proficiency (English vs. Turkish as the stronger (L1) language) and different acquisition histories (early heritage vs. migrant late bilingualism).
Originating in the 1960’s with the work of William Labov, the field of sociolinguistics has given way to a rich literature that continues to uncover the many ways in which social factors influence how we produce, perceive, and process speech. Sociolinguistic research has burgeoned alongside increasing globalization and migration, which has, in the case of the U.S. at least, resulted in increased levels of bilingualism and more frequent interactions with non-native English speakers. My dissertation, which consists of three distinct chapters, combines insights from the sociolinguistic literature with methodologies from cognitive science in order to better understand the ways in which perceptions of identity and social attitudes towards nonstandard language varieties influence our everyday spoken interactions. More specifically, I investigate how several social factors (i.e. language background, dialect stigmatization, and speaker accent) may influence speech production, perception, and processing. The data presented come from over sixty fieldwork interviews, a series of corpus analyses, two online surveys, and one neurolinguistic experiment. In the first paper, I identify how social factors have appeared to influence auxiliary verb choice among some Ecuadorian Spanish speakers. While the markedly frequent use of auxiliary ir, Sp. ‘to go’ in Ecuadorian Spanish has historically been traced to contact effects from Quichua, analysis of a present-day Ecuadorian Spanish corpus reveals that Quichua-Spanish bilinguals do not use the construction significantly more than Spanish monolinguals. Given auxiliary ir may be marked as a slightly nonstandard alternative for the auxiliary estar and that Quichua-Spanish bilinguals have long been denied linguistic prestige in the sociolinguistic stratification of Ecuadorian Spanish, I propose the possibility that language background and dialect stigmatization may explain the current distribution of auxiliary ir production among Ecuadorian Spanish speakers. In the second chapter, I investigate the relationship between speaker accents and American perceptions of nativeness. Specifically, I examined how young adult Midwesterners today perceive two main kinds of Spanish-influenced English varieties: L1 Latino English (as spoken in Chicago, U.S.) and L2 Spanish-accented English (as spoken in Santiago, Chile). Since Latinos have recently become the dominant ethnic minoritized group in the U.S., the varieties of English that they speak are under increasing scrutiny, and cases of linguistic discrimination are on the rise. Results from an accent evaluation survey reveal that respondents distinguished the L1 Latino English from the L2 Spanish-influenced English speaker, but still rated him as slightly more foreign-sounding than L1 speakers with more established U.S. dialects (e.g. New York). In other words, native U.S. speakers perceived as “sounding Hispanic” were perceived as sounding “almost American,” which suggests that what Midwesterners count as sounding American may be in the process of expanding to include U.S.-born Latinos. In the third chapter, I focus on the effect that speaker accent has on online word processing in the brain. Specifically, does Spanish-accented English speech increase activation of the Spanish lexicon in the mind of Spanish-English bilingual listeners? Though more data is needed for a clear answer, preliminary data from an EEG experiment suggests that speaker accent may possibly modulate bilingual lexical activation. This is investigated via analysis of N400 responses from bilingual listeners when false cognates from Spanish were produced by a Spanish-accented English speaker relative to a Chinese-accented English speaker.
Muitas pesquisas na área da psicolinguística e outras subáreas da linguística envolvem análises de tempo de reação (TR) de seres humanos ao lerem determinadas estruturas linguísticas. Esses TRs são utilizados como indicativos da dificuldade de se processar diferentes unidades linguísticas. Para coletar esse tipo de informação dois métodos são bastante utilizados: o rastreamento ocular (Rayner) e a leitura auto-monitorada (Mitchell (a)). No entanto, os dados obtidos por esses métodos podem conter ruídos que tornam as análises dos resultados mais complexas. Neste trabalho, vamos apresentar uma outra opção de método experimental de leitura que parece mitigar esses ruídos: a tarefa labirinto ou maze task (Forster; et al.).
Os proponentes dessa técnica experimental defendem que os dados que ela gera são menos ruidosos pois ela inibe efeitos spill-over, diminui as possibilidades de estratégias de leitura e exige um alto nível de atenção por parte dos participantes. Assim, os dados são encontrados na região esperada e perguntas de compreensão não são necessárias. Descrevemos
nesse artigo alguns dos primeiros estudos que utilizaram essa técnica. Os resultados desses trabalhos corroboram o seu potencial metodológico, já que demonstram que a tarefa gerou dados localizados convergentes com efeitos de processamento previamente observados na literatura.
Given that face-to-face interaction is an important locus for linguistic transmission ( Enfield 2008 : 297), it is argued in this paper that conversational structure must provide affordances ( Gibson 1979 ) for transmitting linguistic items. The paper focuses on repeats where an interactant (partially) repeats their interlocutor’s preceding utterance. Repeats are argued to provide affordances for the transmission of innovative and conservative linguistic items by forcing interactants to repeat linguistic material uttered by another person, facilitating production by exploiting priming effects. Moreover, repeats leave room for modification and thereby for actively resisting transmission. In this way, repeats unite the competing forces ( Tantucci et al. 2018 ) of automaticity and creativity. To support this claim, this paper investigates the use of Spanish insertions and alternative variants in utterance-repeat pairs in Yurakaré (isolate, Bolivia) conversations. The findings are compatible with a holistic view of language where all linguistic levels are interconnected ( Beckner et al. 2009 ).
This study investigates the extent to which speakers of American Norwegian (AmNo), a heritage language spoken in the United States and Canada, use the indefinite article in classifying predicate constructions (‘He is (a) doctor’). Despite intense contact with English, which uses the indefinite article, most AmNo speakers have retained bare nouns, i.e., the pattern of Norwegian as spoken in Norway. However, a minority of the speakers use the indefinite article to some extent. I argue that generally, this use of the indefinite article has arisen through attrition (i.e., a change during the lifetime of individuals), not through divergent attainment causing systematic, parametric change in the Norwegian grammar of these speakers. I also argue that representational economy is one of the factors that may have contributed to the relative stability of bare nouns.
Cambridge Core - Applied Linguistics - Bilingualism in Action - by Luna Filipović
This contribution analyses the role French may have played as a model language in the development of the indirect passive (or recipient passive) in Middle English. It is based on diachronic corpus data showing that the construction appeared in Middle English predominantly with verbs borrowed from French and spread to native verbs only later. The fact that French did not have a recipient passive construction speaks against contact influence, whereas the data as well as the situation of close language contact between Old French and Middle English speak in favour of contact-induced change. The hypothesis of internal change will be contrasted with several explanations in a language contact scenario. The first one is syntactic and regards the type of dative case : English integrated the French structural dative into its native grammar, which so far only had an inherent dative. Passives with structural datives were prior to native constructions and may have triggered them. The transfer may have been facilitated by the reanalysis of certain bridge constructions (proclitics and clausal complements). The more conceptual second part discusses current psycholinguistic research in order to identify methods which help overcome the methodological deadlock that historical linguists are facing when they want to assess the validity of competing explanations.
In this review, we examine how structural priming has been used to investigate the representation of first and second language syntactic structures in bilinguals. Most experiments suggest that structures that are identical in the first and second language have a single, shared mental representation. The results from structures that are similar but not fully identical are less clear, but they may be explained by assuming that first and second language representations are merely connected rather than fully shared. Some research has also used structural priming to investigate the representation of cognate words. We will also consider whether cross-linguistic structural priming taps into long-term implicit learning effects. Finally, we discuss recent research that has investigated how second language syntactic representations develop as learners’ proficiency increases.
A number of recent studies have provided evidence that bilingualism has effects on the first language
representations of bilinguals who are immersed in the L2 environment, or who have undergone
language dominance inversion. In this paper, we address the issue of whether bilingualism influences
in the first language competence and performance are limited to such bilingual profile. We discuss
the outcomes of three experiments through which we have elicited evidence of potential effects of bilingualism on the first languages of both long-time residents in the L2 environment and of bilinguals
who were immersed in their dominant language environment.
According to Hartsuiker et al.'s (2004) shared-syntax account bilinguals share syntactic representations across languages whenever these representations are similar enough. But how does such a system develop in the course of second language (L2) learning? We will review recent work on cross-linguistic structural priming, which considered priming in early second language learners and late second language learners as a function of proficiency. We will then sketch our account of L2 syntactic acquisition. We assume an early phase in which the learner relies on transfer from L1 and imitation, followed by phases in which language- and item-specific syntactic representations are added and in which such representations become increasingly abstract. We argue that structural priming effects in L2 (and between L1 and L2) depend on the structure of this developing network but also on explicit memory processes. We speculate that these memory processes might aid the formation of new representations.
A tarefa de julgamento de aceitabilidade de sentenças temporalizadas é uma das técnicas de eliciação de julgamentos na qual se impõem restrições temporais aos juízes. Propõe-se que essa técnica proporciona observações mais fidedignas de conhecimento implícito e processos automatizados. Este estudo explora a definição de tetos temporais mínimos para a execução dessa tarefa por falantes nativos das línguas dos estímulos, assim como avalia o impacto do recrutamento de amostras de conveniência, formadas por participantes com treinamento em estudos de linguagem, sobre esse tipo de experimento. Os resultados indicam não haver impacto crítico dessa forma de amostragem de conveniência, e que efeitos de gramaticalidade são detectáveis com janelas temporais de 4 segundos para cada sentença.
The speeded sentence acceptability judgment task is a technique for the elicitation of judgments in which temporal constraints are imposed on judges. It is suggested that such technique provides more reliable observations of implicit knowledge and automatic processes. This study explored the setting of minimal temporal ceilings for performance in the speeded acceptability judgment task by native speakers of the stimuli languages, and it also assessed the impact of convenience sampling where participants with language studies backgrounds are recruited. The results show that there is no critical impact of this kind of convenience sampling, and they also show that grammaticality effects are detectable within a time window of 4 seconds per sentence.
This paper presents an extension of the Multiple Grammars Theory (Roeper, 1999) to provide a formal mechanism that can serve as a generative-based alternative to current descriptive models of interlanguage. The theory extends historical work by Kroch and Taylor (1997), and has been taken into a computational direction by Yang (2003). The proposal is based on the idea that any human grammar readily accommodates sets of rules in sub-grammars that can seem (apparently) contradictory. We discuss the rationale behind this proposal and establish a dialogue with recent research in SLA, multilingualism, L3 acquisition, and L2 processing. We compare the Multiple Grammars explanation to optionality in L2 to other current proposals, and provide experimental results that can demonstrate the existence of active sub-grammars in the linguistic representation of L2 speakers.
Verbs are said to play a central role in the lexicalization of events and states—thus they are crucial for understanding how we represent and use information about these events and states in linguistic utterances. This chapter introduces some key controversies in the study of verb meaning and structure from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science. We begin with a methodological discussion on the interdisciplinary investigation characteristic of cognitive science, aiming to understand how different types of evidence might be relevant in uncovering the nature of linguistic and cognitive principles underlying verb meaning and structure, their representations, and processes. We then discuss three broad content areas bearing on verb representation and processing: argument structure, thematic roles, and the nature of semantic or conceptual structure. For each of these areas, we bring sample theoretical and empirical (experimental) research aiming to provide a context for interdisciplinary research conducted in the field and, more specifically, to the chapters collected in the present volume.
One potentially restricting case for grammatical sharing concerns structures that are grammatical in only one of a bilingual speaker’s two languages. Bilingual adults generally do not experience overt structural intrusions from one language into the other, but children sometimes do. This indicates that at some point the overlap between language representations may extend even to structures that should be associated with one language only. If this overlap does exist, then it should be possible to elicit the production of ungrammatical utterances by presenting structurally parallel but grammatical primes in the other language. We developed a novel cross-linguistic structural interference priming paradigm to test for this possibility, which, if confirmed, would be instrumental in determining the extent of representational overlap in the bilingual grammar. Our results obtained with Spanish-English bilingual children confirm that cross-linguistic interference priming can supply a signature of bilingual grammatical sharing.
Interlanguage studies tend to be dominated by investigations of strictly morphosyntactic phenomena. Issues of argument structure and argument realization are shown to be a potentially innovative theoretical approach to the study of L2 learners' knowledge of target language grammar, as they are framed as an interface between semantics and syntax. In this article, evidence of language transfer effects in Brazilian L2 learners' representation of transitivity alternations in verbs of manner of movement are presented to support the view that second language research on the acquisition of argument structure realization patterns is a promising line of enquiry.
Competition Model studies of second language learners have demonstrated that there is a gradual replacement of first language cues for thematic role assignment by second language cues. The current study introduced two methodological innovations in the investigation of this process. The first was the use of mouse-tracking methodology (Spivey, 2007) to assess the online process of thematic role assignment. The second was the inclusion of both a task with language-specific cues and a task with language-common cues. The results of the language-common cue task indicated that, as English-dominant learners become more balanced between English and Spanish, they rely increasingly on a coalition between the animacy cue and the subject–verb agreement cue. However, the results of the language-specific cue task reveal that learners also rely on the cue of prepositional case marking in Spanish and nominal case marking in English. These results provide evidence of forward transfer, backward transfer, and rapid acquisition of cue-based sentence interpretation strategies in second language learning.
This article presents two experiments employing two structural priming paradigms that investigated whether cross-linguistic syntactic priming occurred in Chinese and English passive sentences that differ in word order (production-to-production priming in Experiment 1 and comprehension-to-production priming in Experiment 2). Results revealed that cross-linguistic syntactic priming occurred in Chinese and English passive sentences, regardless of production of primes or comprehension of primes and language direction (L1-L2 or L2-L1). Our findings indicate that word-order similarity between languages is not necessary for cross-linguistic structural priming, supporting the view of a two-stage model of language production.
The occurrence of codeswitching, or the seemingly random alternation of two languages both between and within sentences, has been shown (Gumperz, 1976; Pfaff, 1975; Wentz, 1977) to be governed not only by extralinguistic but also linguistic factors. For the balanced bilingual, codeswitching appears to be subject to an ‘equivalence constraint’ (Poplack, 1978): i.e. it tends to occur at points in discourse where juxtaposition of L1 and L2 elements does not violate a surface syntactic rule of either language. If correct, the equivalence constraint on codeswitching may be used to measure degree of bilingual ability. It was hypothesized that equivalence would either be violated by non-fluent bilinguals, or that switch points which are ‘risky’ in terms of syntactic well-formedness (i.e. those which occur within a sentence) would tend to be avoided altogether. To test this hypothesis, I analysed the speech of 20 Puerto Rican residents of a stable bilingual community, exhibiting varying degrees of bilingual ability. Quantitative analysis of their switches revealed that both fluent and non-fluent bilinguals were able to code-switch frequently and still maintain grammaticality in both Lx and L2. While fluent bilinguals tended to switch at various syntactic boundaries within the sentence, non-fluent bilinguals favoured switching between sentences, allowing them to participate in the codeswitching mode, without fear of violating a grammatical rule of either of the languages involved. These results suggest that the codeswitching mode proceeds from that area of the bilingual's grammar where the surface structures of Lx and L2 overlap, and that codeswitching, rather than representing debasement of linguistic skill, is actually a sensitive indicator of bilingual ability.
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This volume presents a framework that expands the traditional concept of a vocabulary test to cover a range of procedures for assessing the vocabulary knowledge of second language learners.
This authoritative 2003 textbook provides an overview and analysis of current second language acquisition research conducted within the generative linguistic framework. Lydia White argues that second language acquisition is constrained by principles and parameters of Universal Grammar. The book focuses on characterizing and explaining the underlying linguistic competence of second language learners in terms of these contraints. Theories as to the role of Universal Grammar and the extent of mother tongue influence are presented and discussed, with particular consideration given to the nature of the interlanguage grammar at different points in development, from the initial state to ultimate attainment. Throughout the book, hypotheses maintaining that second language grammars are constrained by universal principles are contrasted with claims that Universal Grammar is not implicated; relevant empirical research is presented from both sides of the debate. This textbook is essential reading for those studying second language acquisition from a linguistic perspective.
The cross-linguistic differences documented in studies of relative clause attachment offer an invaluable opportunity to examine a particular aspect of bilingual sentence processing: Do bilinguals process their two languages as if they were monolingual speakers of each? This volume provides a review of existing research on relative clause attachment, showing that speakers of languages like English attach relative clauses differently than do speakers of languages like Spanish. Fernández reports the findings of an investigation with monolinguals and bilinguals, tested using speeded ("on-line") and unspeeded ("off-line") methodology, with materials in both English and Spanish. The experiments reveal similarities across the groups when the procedure is speeded, but differences with unspeeded questionnaires: The monolinguals replicate the standard cross-linguistic differences, while bilinguals have language-independent preferences determined by language dominance — bilinguals process stimuli in either of their languages according to the general preferences of monolinguals of their dominant language.
Translation and interpreting are deeply interconnected with bilingualism. Without high degrees of bilingualism, neither translation nor interpreting is feasible. This does not mean, however, that either translation or interpreting is a by-product of bilingualism. Rather it means that high attainment in bilingualism is a precondition for highly proficient translation/interpreting. The relationship between language ability, types of bilingualism, and translation/interpreting performance has not been sufficiently researched.
This article examines sentence matching, a methodology frequently used in the second language (L2) literature to determine notions of grammaticality of nonnative speakers (NNS). Native speakers (NS) of French and L2 learners of French performed a sentence-matching task focusing on three areas of French grammar: adverb placement, subject-verb agreement and clitic-pronoun placement. In sentence-matching tasks participants respond to two sentences on a computer screen indicating whether the two sentences are identical or not. In general, grammatical sentences are responded to faster than ungrammatical sentences and have been used in the L2 literature as a way of determining grammatical knowledge. The results from the NSs of French show that when there is a high degree of difficulty in interpretation of ungrammatical sentences, sentence matching is a useful tool for determining grammaticality. For NNSs there is little evidence that sentence matching predicts grammaticality. A traditional acceptability judgement task was administered to NNSs. Sentence-matching did not correlate with NNS's individual notions of grammaticality. Issues of proficiency level and the nature of ungrammatical sentences are important determinants when considering the validity of sentence-matching as a research tool.
This volume contains selected papers from the 27th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL-27), which was held at the University of California, Irvine, on February 20-22, 1997. The 22 papers deal with current issues in linguistic theory as they can be illuminated by the close analysis and comparative study of Romance languages. A majority of the articles tackles topics in syntax and semantics; the rest is divided among topics in language acquisition, phonology, morphology, and sociolinguistics. Among the well-represented Romance languages examined are (Old) French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
We investigated trial-by-trial and cumulative cross-language effects of structural priming and verb bias on L1 and L2 dative syntactic choices (e.g., ‘boy-give-ball-to-girl’ [PO structure] vs. ‘boy-give-girl-ball’ [DO structure]). Dutch-dominant Dutch–English bilinguals listened to a prime sentence with a DO or PO structure in one language and then described a picture in the other language, using verbs that varied in their bias towards the PO or DO structure in Dutch and English. We found effects of cross-language structural priming and verb bias on syntactic choice, some of which were influenced by the participants’ language dominance. In addition, we found cumulative forms of structural priming, leading to cross-language priming effects between experimental blocks. We discuss these results in terms of models on the representation of lexical and syntactic information in bilinguals, and point out how the observed effects can be related to experience-based mechanisms of language use and contact-induced language change.
The collected essays in this volume present an overview and state-of-the-field of traditional and recently developed methodological approaches to the study of bilingual reading comprehension. It critically reviews and examines major findings from classical behavioral approaches such as the visual moving window, rapid-serial visual presentation (RSVP), and eye-tracking, as well as newly developing neuropsycholinguistic methodologies such as Event-Related Potentials (ERPS), and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Written to address a timely topic, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research updates the field of bilingual reading by critically examining the contributions of the various behavioral and technologically-based reading techniques used to understand psychological processes underlying written language comprehension. Each topic is covered first from a theoretical, and then from an experimental, viewpoint. Moreover, the volume contributes to the development and establishment of Bilingual Reading as a subfield of bilingual sentence processing and fills a significant gap in the literature on bilingual language processing and thought. Significantly, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research presents an overall view of some of the typical psycholinguistic techniques and approaches, as well as proposing other possible tasks that may prove viable in investigating such theoretical issues as bilingual lexical ambiguity resolution, or how bilingual speakers might resolve multiple sources of potentially conflicting information as they comprehend sentences and discourse during the communicative process. In addition, to aid reader comprehension and encourage readers to acquire “hands on” experience in the creation and development of experiments in the realm of bilingual reading research, each chapter includes a list of key words, suggested student research projects, and questions to both help the reader review the chapter and expand upon the reading. With its comprehensive coverage of a crucial subfield of psycholinguistics and language processing, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research is an invaluable and informative resource for all students and researchers in bilingualism, neurolinguistics, bilingual cognition, and other related fields.
This chapter examines off-line and on-line methodologies used to study bilinguals. We demonstrate how methodological choices in experimental design are linked to the theoretical frameworks within which the research is cast. We illustrate how to identify appropriate methodological paradigms drawing from research on the integration of languages in bilinguals, specifically work on how bilinguals process argument structures with different restrictions in the standard grammars of their languages. We report data from Portuguese-English bilinguals and their monolingual counterparts performing three different tasks: off-line acceptability judgments using magnitude estimations, on-line self-paced reading, and sentence recall/sentence matching (i.e., providing whole sentence reading times, speech initiation times, and oral recall errors). With both on-line and off-line measures, bilinguals have different restrictions in argument structures than their monolingual counterparts, in their first language. The overall pattern suggests that these differences are rooted in grammatical representations rather than being driven by performance variables.
Bilingualism is not a phenomenon of language; it is a characteristic of its use. It is not a feature of the code but of the message. It does not belong to the domain of “langue” but of “parole.”
If language is the property of the group, bilingualism is the property of the individual. An individual’s use of two languages supposes the existence of two different language communities; it does not suppose the existence of a bilingual community. The bilingual community can only be regarded as a dependent collection of individuals who have reasons for being bilingual. A self-sufficient bilingual community has no reason to remain bilingual, since a closed community in which everyone is fluent in two languages could get along just as well with one language. As long as there are different monolingual communities, however, there is likelihood of contact between them; this contact results in bilingualism.
The relationship between verbs and their arguments is a widely debated topic in linguistics. This comprehensive survey provides an overview of this important research area, exploring theories of how a verb’s semantics can determine the morphosyntactic realization of its arguments. Assuming a close connection between verb meaning and syntactic structure, the analysis constructs a bridge between lexical–semantic and syntactic research. Synthesizing work results from a range of linguistic subdisciplines and a variety of theoretical frameworks, it will be invaluable to research in syntax, semantics, and related fields.
Bilinguals communicate differently when they are with monolinguals and when they are with bilinguals who share their languages. Whereas they avoid using their other language(s) with monolinguals, they may call upon it (or them) when interacting with bilinguals, either by changing over completely to the other language(s) or by bringing elements of the other language(s) into the language they are speaking.
Keywords:
bilingualism;
cognitive science;
perception;
psycholinguistics;
multilingualism
We investigate here the contribution of code-switching and structural priming to variable expression of the Spanish first person singular subject pronoun in the New Mexican bilingual community. Comparisons with both Spanish and English benchmarks indicate no convergence of Spanish toward English grammar, including in the presence of code-switching, where the linguistic conditioning of variant selection remains unaltered. We find a language-internal and cross-language priming effect, albeit of differing strength, such that speakers’ preceding coreferential (Spanish and English) subject pronouns favor subsequent pronouns, whereas unexpressed subjects tend to be followed by unexpressed subjects. Given the rarity of unexpressed subjects in English, in the presence of code-switching fewer tokens occur with unexpressed primes. Thus, code-switching has no intrinsic effect. Instead, it results in associated shifts in the distribution of contextual features relevant to priming, contrary to the convergence-via-code-switching hypothesis and in accordance with the contextual distribution-via-code-switching hypothesis, which we put forward here.
This paper sketches a comprehensive framework for modeling and interpreting language contact phenomena, with speakers’ bilingual strategies in specific scenarios of language contact as its point of departure. Bilingual strategies are conditioned by social factors, processing constraints of speakers’ bilingual competence, and perceived language distance. In a number of domains of language contact studies important progress has been made, including Creole studies, code-switching, language development, linguistic borrowing, and areal convergence. Less attention has been paid to the links between these fields, so that results in one domain can be compared with those in another. These links are approached here from the perspective of speaker optimization strategies. Four strategies are proposed: maximize structural coherence of the first language (L1); maximize structural coherence of the second language (L2); match between L1 and L2 patterns where possible; and rely on universal principles of language processing. These strategies can be invoked to explain outcomes of language contact. Different outcomes correspond to different interactions of these strategies in bilingual speakers and their communities.
Turkish as spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) sounds (unconventional) to Turkish speakers in Turkey (TR-Turkish). We claim that this is due to structural contact-induced change that is, however, located within specific lexically complex units copied from Dutch. This article investigates structural change in NL-Turkish through analyses of spoken corpora collected in the bilingual Turkish community in the Netherlands and in a monolingual community in Turkey. The analyses reveal that at the current stage of contact, NL-Turkish is not copying Dutch syntax as such, but rather translates lexically complex individual units into Turkish. Perceived semantic equivalence between Dutch units and their Turkish equivalents plays a crucial role in this translation process. Counter to expectations, the TR-Turkish data also contained unconventional units, though they differed in type, and were much less frequent than those in NL-Turkish. We conclude that synchronic variation in individual NL-Turkish units can contain the seeds of future syntactic change, which will only be visible after an increase in the type and token frequency of the changing units.
Behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures are reported for a study in which relatively proficient Chinese-English bilinguals named identical pictures in each of their two languages. Production occurred only in Chinese (the first language, L1) or only in English (the second language, L2) in a given block with the order counterbalanced across participants. The repetition of pictures across blocks was expected to produce facilitation in the form of faster responses and more positive ERPs. However, we hypothesized that if both languages are activated when naming one language alone, there might be evidence of inhibition of the stronger L1 to enable naming in the weaker L2. Behavioral data revealed the dominance of Chinese relative to English, with overall faster and more accurate naming performance in L1 than L2. However, reaction times for naming in L1 after naming in L2 showed no repetition advantage and the ERP data showed greater negativity when pictures were named in L1 following L2. This greater negativity for repeated items suggests the presence of inhibition rather than facilitation alone. Critically, the asymmetric negativity associated with the L1 when it followed the L2 endured beyond the immediate switch of language, implying long-lasting inhibition of the L1. In contrast, when L2 naming followed L1, both behavioral and ERP evidence produced a facilitatory pattern, consistent with repetition priming. Taken together, the results support a model of bilingual lexical production in which candidates in both languages compete for selection, with inhibition of the more dominant L1 when planning speech in the less dominant L2. We discuss the implications for modeling the scope and time course of inhibitory processes.
2016 printing has a new preface and expanded indexes. Available at http://www.amazon.com/empirical-base-linguistics-Grammaticality-methodology/dp/3946234046/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456093168&sr=8-1&keywords=schutze+carson
Three experiments examine whether a naturalistic reading task can induce long-lasting
changes of syntactic patterns in memory. Judgment of grammatical acceptability is used
as an indirect test of memory for sentences that are identical or only syntactically similar
to those read earlier. In previous research (Luka & Barsalou, 2005) both sorts of sentences
were found more acceptable, yielding a structural preference for recently encountered syntactic
patterns. The effect is evident across a very diverse set of some 60 distinct sentence
constructions. This phenomenon may be similar to implicit learning paradigms using evaluative
ratings as dependent measures, but also resembles a variety of shorter-lived structural
priming effects observed for a handful of syntactic constructions that occur in binary
alternate forms. Here we examine the duration of the structural preference effect to determine
whether it is fleeting (suggesting transient priming) or long-lasting (suggesting
enduring changes in representation). Experiments 1 and 2 show that the effect is evident
after a 48-h delay between initial exposure (simple reading aloud) and test. Experiment
3 shows a persistent effect after 7 days, despite unrestricted exposure to natural language
in the interim. Larger effects were observed for comparatively novel sentence constructions
than common syntactic patterns. Experiments 2 and 3 also examine the role of the
evaluation process itself, and find that reading for comprehension produces greater facilitation
than reading while performing an evaluative categorization (grammaticality rating).
These observations suggest that incremental adjustments to the language processing system
occur on a continuous basis and may extend to acquisition of novel syntactic structures.
We discuss whether and in what ways the structural preference effect can be
integrated with the literature on structural priming. We interpret our results in the context
of models of language comprehension, emphasize the dynamic nature of grammatical
knowledge in memory, and argue that the current paradigm offers several advantages
for elaborating the various systems of memory upon which linguistic representations
depend.
All language is, to a varying extent, poetic. Investigating the relationship between conversational and literary discourse illuminates the workings of conversation. Past research suggests the pervasiveness of repetition, and its significance in questioning prior theoretical and methodological assumptions. Repetition functions in production, comprehension, connection, and interaction. The congruence of these levels provides a fourth, over-arching function in COHERENCE, which builds on and creates interpersonal involvement. Examples illustrate the pervasiveness, functions, and automatic nature of repetition in taped, transcribed conversation-supporting a view of discourse as relatively pre-patterned, rather than generated. Repetition is a resource by which speakers create a discourse, a relationship, and a world.
L'article presente d'abord les etudes anterieures effectuees sur les contraintes du changement de code, et donne une definition du concept, qu'il envisage comme l'utilisation de deux langues differentes dans une seule phrase, ou groupe de phrases. Il enumere ensuite les types de contraintes possibles et presente l'etude qu'il a menee sur un corpus bilingue allemand-anglais et neerlandais-anglais en Australie
This paper argues for a refinement in the traditional approach to transfer in SLA, where transfer is generally investigated as the unidirectional influence of native (or other language) knowledge on the acquisition and use of a second language. We show that transfer can be bidirectional, influencing an individual's use of both the L1 and L2. We further argue that bidirectional transfer can be simultaneous or synchronic and base this conclusion on the results of our analysis of oral narratives produced by 22 Russian L2 users of English, who learned English post-puberty after having lived in the USA for 3-8 years. The narratives, collected in Russian and English, demonstrate that crosslinguistic influence works both ways in the oral production of these L2 users: while Russian continues to influence their English, their English has begun to influence their Russian as well. We discuss the factors that may influence the directionality and amount of transfer in these L2 users, as well as ways in which various types of transfer are similar and different in their two languages. Then, we outline the implications of our findings for the future study of transfer in SLA and bilingualism.
This paper investigates the various waysspeakers manage problems and overcome difficulties in L2 communication. FollowingDörnyei and Scott (1997), we distinguish four main sources of L2 communicationproblems: (a) resource deficits, (b) processing time pressure, (c) perceived deficiencies inone's own language output, and (d) perceived deficiencies in the interlocutor'sperformance. In order to provide a systematic description of the wide range of copingmechanisms associated with these problem areas (e.g., communication strategies, meaningnegotiation mechanisms, hesitation devices, repair mechanisms), we adopt a psycholinguisticapproach based on Levelt's (1989, 1993, 1995) model of speech production.Problem-solving devices, then, are analyzed and classified according to how they are related tothe different pre- and post-articulatory phases of speech processing, and we illustrate the variousmechanisms by examples and retrospective comments taken from L2 learners' data.
Clear and well-organised, this textbook is an introduction to Spanish syntax, which assumes no prior knowledge of current theory. Beginning with a descriptive overview of the major characteristics of the grammar, it goes on to describe facts about Spanish, such as its word order, notions of 'subject', 'direct object', 'auxiliary verb' and so on. The book combines traditional grammatical description with perspectives gained from recent research in the Principles and Parameters framework. It also presents useful theoretical notions such as semantic roles, Case, and Predication. Accessibly written, the book gives just enough background so as to allow the reader to understand the lines of investigation that have been pursued in accounting for such issues as clause structure and constituent order. It will be of use to students who are interested in grammar, Spanish, or in some of the basic results of modern, formal linguistic theory.
In two previous papers (Lombardi & Potter, 1992; Potter & Lombardi, 1990) we reported evidence that immediate recall of a sentence requires regeneration from the message level, rather than from a verbatim representation. However, participants tended to reproduce the surface syntax even when there were two meaning-equivalent surface structures available (e.g., for dative verbs, “gave the letter to her mother,” “gave her mother the letter”). In three experiments we tested the hypothesis that this verbatim bias is the result of syntactic priming (Bock, 1986). In Experiment 1 single sentences were recalled; the prime sentence preceded the target dative sentence. In Experiments 2 and 3 two-clause sentences were recalled; the second clause served as a prime that had been perceived but not yet recalled when the first clause was produced, or vice versa. When the prime sentence or clause was a dative that mismatched the surface structure of the target there was an increase in changes to the alternate (primed) structure in recall of the target, compared with control primes. These results support the hypothesis that simply perceiving a sentence is enough to prime its surface syntactic structure, contributing to verbatim recall.