Mental representations of crosslinguistically different structures in Italian-English proficient bilinguals. The case of si-causative passives.

Abstract

Syntactic priming is a paradigm which helps linguists understand how speakers abstractly represent the languages that they master. This paradigm has been largely used in the field of psycholinguistics with the purpose of ascertaining whether bilinguals represent syntactic information as integrated and shared between the languages that they speak. This study aims at investigating how Italian native speakers and L2 learners of English abstractly represent similar (active- and venire-passive sentences) and non-correspondent (si-causative-passive sentences) structures between languages. If participants share the representation of non-correspondent structures between their first language (L1) and their second language (L2), then Italian si-causative passives (e.g. Il figlio si fa aiutare dal papà per la verifica) should prime English passive sentences. A higher number of English passives is therefore predicted to be produced after prior exposure to Italian venire- and si-causative-passive primes. Participants were asked to read and type out one filler and one prime sentence in Italian. Then, they were presented with one target picture and a verb that they had to use for the picture description task in English. Participants produced a higher number of passive sentences after both venire- and si-causative-passive primes. Hence, results were consistent with Hartsuiker et al. 's (2004) shared-syntax account, confirming that proficient speakers do share syntactic information for the languages that they master, both with regard to crosslinguistically similar and different structures.