Teasing apart the impact of different forms of overlap on cross-linguistic structural priming

Abstract

In the current paper, we examined the extent to which cross-linguistic structural priming effects can be found in genetically-unrelated languages, assessing the sensitivity of priming to varying degrees of overlap between the prime and target languages. In three experiments (Ns = 59, 57, 52), we tested the priming of L2 English passive sentences in response to patient-initial prime sentences in Tagalog (Experiments 1, 2) and Indonesian (Experiment 3). The linguistic properties of Tagalog and Indonesian allowed us to manipulate prime-target overlap in thematic role order, syntactic–thematic role mapping, and constituent order. Cross-linguistic priming effects were moderated by the degree of linguistic overlap between prime and target: priming effects were stronger given an overlap in syntactic–thematic role mapping, and strongest for shared constituent order. The results suggest that cross-linguistic priming effects can have different loci, and that each one has an additive effect on priming magnitude.