Syntactic processing in Korean-English bilingual production: evidence from cross-linguistic structural priming.

A structural priming experiment investigated whether grammatical encoding in production consists of one or two stages and whether oral bilingual language production is shared at the functional or positional level [Bock, J. K., Levelt, W. (1994). Language production. Grammatical encoding. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 945-984). San Diego, CA: Academic Press] by manipulating syntactic structure and argument order in structurally parallel Korean and English dative sentences. The results revealed that structural priming across languages can occur when both languages share syntactic structure, independent of argument order. Specifically, cross-linguistic argument-order-independent structural priming in canonical Korean postpositional and English prepositional dative structures was observed, providing evidence for shared bilingual syntactic processing occurring at the abstract, functional level within a two-stage grammatical encoding process. This is the first demonstration of cross-linguistic priming of argument-order-independent structural information.