Shall I take the high node? Cross-linguistic structural priming of relative clause attachment in Italian-English late bilinguals

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether bilinguals have a single, integrated representation of syntactic information (the interactive view) or whether the L1 syntactic representations and mechanisms are kept strictly separated from those of the later acquired languages (the modular view). Within the scope of this study, we investigate the cross-linguistic syntactic priming of relative clause attachment in Italian-English adult bilinguals with different levels of proficiency in English. The data was collected through a sentence completion experiment in which participants had to generate NP-of-NP-RC constructions. Prime fragments were constrained as to whether the relative pronoun followed by a number-marked verb permitted high (referring to the NP higher up in the syntactic tree) or low attachment (referring to the NP lower in the syntactic tree). The target fragments were unconstrained with respect to RC attachment. Previous studies have found that the preferred attachment of the RC varies cross-linguistically, the experiment was preceded by a study investigating the RC attachment preference in monolingual Italian speakers.