The Role of Construction Similarity and Verb Tense on the Construction of Integrated Syntactic Representations in Bilinguals

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of construction similarity and verb tense in the construction of integrated syntactic representations in Persian and English bilinguals. Bilingual speakers aged 18 to 40 years (mean= 23 years old) fluent in Persian (as a mother tongue) and English (as a second language) attended in this study. We used the cross-language syntactic priming paradigm. The participants were first presented a sentence (prime sentence) in language A, which had a special syntactic construction such as the passive structure. Then the participants had to produce a sentence in language B (target sentence) in order to describe the target picture. If her/his production of sentences in language B is significantly influenced by the syntactic structure of the sentence that was first presented to her/him (i.e., s/he uses the same syntactic construction of the previous sentence), it is feasible to believe that crosslanguage syntactic priming occurred. In the present study, 4 experiments were designed in which the language of the prime sentence was Persian or English and the target language was either Persian or English. Also, in order to examine whether the syntactic representation is independent from the tense of the verb and whether syntactic priming is affected by whether tense of the verb stayed the same or differed between prime and target, the tense of the prime and target sentences was either the same or different in Experiments 2 and 4. The results showed that there were no cross-language priming effects in any linguistic directions (Persian to English and English to Persian). These results showed that structural differences in Persian and English languages are an influential factor in the occurrence of cross-language syntactic priming and, different word order of passive sentences prevents the occurrence of crosslanguage syntactic priming. The results from Experiments 2 and 4 also revealed that if the tense of the prime sentence is different or the same from the tense of the target sentence, cross-language syntactic priming did not occur.