The shared syntactic representation of the passive structure between Italian and English in late bilinguals: Evidence from cross-linguistic structural priming.

Abstract

The purpose of the thesis is to investigate, through a cross-linguistic structural priming, bilinguals’ syntactic representation of the passive structure. Although passive is considered a complex construction, and it is infrequently encountered in oral language, priming studies have shown that children develop an abstract representation of passive at a very young age (Bencini & Valian, 2008). This thesis aims to demonstrate that the bilinguals’ structural representation of the passive in the two languages is stored together within the bilingual memory. In order to explore this issue, a cross-linguistic experiment was used to test production of active and passive transitive sentences. The experiment was conducted on adult Italian-English late bilinguals with intermediate to high English proficiency. Participants were presented first with two English sentence they had to read out loud, then with a picture that they were required to describe using an Italian sentence. Results show that between-languages priming of passives occurs, providing thus that syntactic representation of the passive structure is shared between similar structures across languages (Hartsuiker et al., 2004) in bilinguals with intermediate-high L2 proficiency. This thesis also explores whether or not animacy manipulation has an effect on the priming of passive sentence, and it does so by inserting two different animacy conditions: transitive sentences containing inanimate agent and animate patient (InAn), and transitive sentences containing inanimate agent and patient (InIn). Results showed that there is a priming effect and that the priming of passive sentences is stronger in the InAn.