Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-glrdx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T00:48:03.488Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Effects of phonological feedback on the selection of syntax: Evidence from between-language syntactic priming*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2011

SARAH BERNOLET ,
ROBERT J. HARTSUIKER  and
MARTIN J. PICKERING
SARAH BERNOLET*
Affiliation:
Ghent University
ROBERT J. HARTSUIKER
Affiliation:
Ghent University
MARTIN J. PICKERING
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
Address for correspondence: Sarah Bernolet, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Gent, Belgium sarah.bernolet@ugent.be
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Research on word production in bilinguals has often shown an advantage for cognate words. According to some accounts, this cognate effect is caused by feedback from a level that represents information about phonemes (or graphemes) to a level concerned with the word. In order to investigate whether phonological feedback influences the selection of words and syntactic constructions in late bilinguals, we investigated syntactic priming between Dutch and English genitive constructions (e.g., the fork of the girl vs. the girl's fork). The head nouns of prime and target constructions were always translation equivalents. Half of these were Dutch–English cognates with a large phonological overlap (e.g., vork–fork), the other half were non-cognates that had very few phonemes in common (e.g., eend–duck). Cognate status boosted between-language syntactic priming. Further analyses showed a continuous effect of phonological overlap for cognates and non-cognates, indicating that this boost was at least partly caused by feedback from the translation equivalents’ shared phonemes.

Keywords

syntaxphonological feedbacksyntactic primingbilingualscognates

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 503 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

The authors wish to thank Jürgen Meisel and three anonymous reviewers for their comments, and Marloes Bressers for drawing the target pictures.

References

Bernolet, S., Hartsuiker, R. J., & Pickering, M. J. (2007). Shared syntactic representations in bilinguals: Evidence for the role of word-order repetition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 931–949.Google ScholarPubMed
Bernolet, S., Hartsuiker, R. J., & Pickering, M. J. (2009). Persistence of emphasis in language production: A cross-linguistic approach. Cognition, 112, 300–317.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355–387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. K. (1987). An effect of the accessibility of word-forms on sentence structures. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 119–137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177–192.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., & Cleland, A. A. (2000). Syntactic co-ordination in dialogue. Cognition, 75, B13–B25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caramazza, A. (1997). How many levels of processing are there in lexical access? Cognitive Neuropsychology, 14, 177–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caramazza, A., Costa, A., Miozzo, M., & Bi, Y. (2001). The specific-word frequency effect: Implications for the representation of homophones in speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 27, 1430–1450.Google ScholarPubMed
Cleland, A. A., & Pickering, M. J. (2003). The use of lexical and syntactic information in language production: Evidence from the priming of noun-phrase structure. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 214–230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colomé, A. (2001). Lexical activation in bilinguals’ speech production: Language-specific or language-independent? Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 721–736.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Costa, A., Caramazza, A., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2000). The cognate facilitation effect: Implications for models of lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1283–1296.Google ScholarPubMed
Costa, A., Roelstraete, B., & Hartsuiker, R. J. (2006). The lexical bias effect in bilingual speech production: Evidence for feedback between lexical and sublexical levels across languages. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 972–977.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Costa, A., Santésteban, M., & Caño, A. (2005). On the facilitatory effects of cognate words in bilingual speech production. Brain and Language, 94, 94–103.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological Review, 93, 283–321.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Desmet, T., & Declercq, M. (2006). Cross-linguistic priming of syntactic hierarchical configuration information. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 610–632.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dijkstra, T., Grainger, J., & Van Heuven, W. J. B. (1999). Recognition of cognates and interlingual homographs: The neglected role of phonology. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 496–518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H., & Acenas, L. A. R. (2004). What is a TOT? Cognate and translation effects on tip-of-the-tongue states in Spanish–English and Tagalog–English bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 246–269.Google ScholarPubMed
Harley, T. A. (1993). Phonological activation of semantic competitors during lexical access in speech production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8, 291–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartsuiker, R. J. (2006). Are speech error patterns affected by a monitoring bias? Language and Cognitive Processes, 21, 856–891.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartsuiker, R. J., Bernolet, S., Schoonbaert, S., Speybroeck, S., & Vanderelst, D. (2008). Syntactic priming persists while the lexical boost decays: Evidence from written and spoken dialogue. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 214–238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartsuiker, R. J., & Pickering, M. J. (2008). Language integration in bilingual sentence production. Acta Psychologica, 128, 479–489.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish–English bilinguals. Psychological Science, 15, 409–414.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoshino, N., & Kroll, J. F. (2008). Cognate effects in picture naming: Does cross-language activation survive a change of script? Cognition, 106, 501–511.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 434–446.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jescheniak, J. D., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Word frequency effects in speech production: Retrieval of syntactic information and of phonological form. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 824–843.Google Scholar
Kirsner, K., Lalor, E., & Hird, K. (1993). The bilingual lexicon: Exercise, meaning and morphology. In Schreuder, R., & Weltens, B. (eds.), The bilingual lexicon, pp. 215–246. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, M. W., & Gibbons, J. (2007). Rhythmic alternation and the optional complementiser in English: New evidence of phonological influence on grammatical encoding. Cognition, 105, 446–456.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lemhöfer, K., Dijkstra, T., & Michel, M. C. (2004). Three languages, one ECHO: Cognate effects in trilingual word recognition. Language and Cognitive Processes, 19, 585–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Loebell, H., & Bock, K. (2003). Structural priming across languages. Linguistics, 41, 791–824.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, M. J., & Branigan, H. P. (1998). The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 633–651.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, M. J., & Ferreira, V. S. (2008). Structural priming: A critical review. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 427–459.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rapp, B., & Goldrick, M. (2000). Discreteness and interactivity in spoken word production. Psychological Review, 107, 460–499.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salamoura, A., & Williams, J. N. (2007). Processing verb argument structure across languages: Evidence for shared representations in the bilingual mental lexicon. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 627–660.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sánchez-Casas, R., & García-Albea, J. E. (2005). The representation of cognate and non-cognate words in bilingual memory: Can cognate status be characterized as a special kind of morphological relation? In Kroll, J. F. & De Groot, A. M. B. (eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches, pp. 226–250. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Santésteban, M., Pickering, M. J., & McLean, J. F. (2010). Lexical and phonological effects on syntactic processing: Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 347–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoonbaert, S., Hartsuiker, R. J., & Pickering, M. J. (2007). The representation of lexical and syntactic information in bilinguals: Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 153–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, A. I., & Kroll, J. F. (2006). Bilingual lexical activation in sentence context. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 197–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Assche, E., Duyck, W., Hartsuiker, R. J., & Diependaele, K. (2009). Does bilingualism change native-language reading? Cognate effects in a sentence context. Psychological Science, 20, 923–927.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Hell, J. G., & De Groot, A. M. B. (2008). Sentence context modulates visual word recognition and translation in bilinguals. Acta Psychologica, 128, 431–451.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van Hell, J. G., & Dijkstra, T. (2002). Foreign language knowledge can influence native language performance in exclusively native contexts. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 54, 780–789.CrossRefGoogle Scholar