Structural priming across languages*

In structural priming, the structure of one sentence is echoed in the structure of a second sentence that may be otherwise unrelated to the first. It can occur without the intention to create syntactic parallelism and without specific pragmatic, thematic, and lexical support across utterances. To explore whether it can also occur without specific language support, when the source of priming is an utterance in a different language, we investigated structural priming in fluent German-English bilinguals. After producing a designated sentence in either their first (German) or second (English) language, speakers extemporaneously described an unrelated pictured event in the other language. The primed constructions were datives (prepositional and double-object datives) and transitives (actives and passives). The results showed that the production of German dative sentences primed the subsequent use of English datives, and the production of English datives primed German datives. German and English passives with different structures did not prime one another. The results offer evidence for a structural source of priming and suggest a common psycholinguistic scaffolding for the bilingual phenomena of codeswitching and transfer. More broadly, they support the argument for basic psycholinguistic continuities among language learning, normal and bilingual language use, and language change.