Cross-linguistic Structural Priming of the Dative Alternation in English-Italian Heritage Bilinguals

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate whether English-Italian heritage bilinguals share the abstract representations of certain syntactic structures across languages (Hartsuiker et al., 2004). A Structural Priming experiment with a Spoken Description Task was used to test whether the English dative alternation – Double Object (DO) / Prepositional Dative (PD) – primes dative constructions in Italian, in which only PDs are licensed, even though with a relatively unconstrained word order (e.g., “La ragazza ha dato un fiore alla maestra” or “La ragazza ha dato alla maestra un fiore”). While we predicted an overall higher production of Italian PD descriptions after English PD and DO primes, we also predicted that DO primes in English would influence the production of dative target descriptions in Italian, yielding unexpected target descriptions such as Shifted PDs or unlicensed DOs. Such results led to the hypothesis that priming of dative alternation between English and Italian occurs at different stages of language processing, i.e., at the conceptual or grammatical encoding level (Cai, Pickering, and Branigan, 2012). Furthermore, a comparative analysis of the dative target productions was conducted between English-Italian heritage bilinguals and English Late Learners of Italian as L2, who acted as a control group.