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Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Chinese-Japanese bilinguals during sentence production: an fMRI study
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Poster A26 in Poster Session A - Sandbox Series, Thursday, October 24, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 4
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Qiang Huang1, Yuto Aki1, Daiko Takahashi1, Motoaki Sugiura2, Hyeonjeong Jeong1; 1Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Tohoku University, 2Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, Tohoku University
Most studies support the shared-syntax account for bilingual sentence production, particularly among Indo-European languages with similar Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word orders. This indicates that bilinguals share syntactic representations, including fundamental grammatical principles, across their languages (e.g., Hartsuiker et al., 2004). However, the debate intensifies when investigating bilinguals who speak languages with different word orders. Early studies found no evidence of cross-linguistic syntactic priming between languages with different word orders such as German (SOV) and English (SVO), suggesting the separate-syntax account (e.g., Loebell & Bock, 2003). In contrast, recent studies on Korean (SOV) – English (SVO) bilinguals suggest that even languages with different surface word orders share abstract syntactic representation (e.g., Hwang et al., 2018). This controversy raises the question of whether shared syntax originates from surface word order or abstract syntactic representations across languages. To address this issue, this ongoing study will conduct an fMRI experiment to observe the repetition suppression effect, which is manifested in decreased brain activation following syntactic priming in syntax-related networks—specifically, the pars opercularis of inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) for syntactic processing and anterior superior temporal gyrus (STG) for word order processing (cf. Grodzinsky & Friederici, 2006). Thirty Chinese-Japanese bilingual participants will be recruited to complete picture-description tasks. Participants will initially listen to a sentence in Chinese as L1 priming, and then orally describe an image in L2 Japanese. To investigate whether bilinguals share syntactic representations in sentence production, we manipulate the surface word order and abstract structure between the priming L1 Chinese (Ba structure active SOV; active SVO; passive SOV) and the target L2 Japanese (active and passive: both SOV) and create three comparisons: sharing both word order and abstract structure (Passive-Passive vs. Active-Passive), sharing only abstract structure (Passive-Passive vs. Ba-Passive), and sharing only surface word orders (Ba-Passive vs. Active-Passive). First, to explore the effects of combining surface word order and abstract structure, we will compare the same word order with priming conditions to different word order without priming conditions: Passive-Passive vs. Active-Passive. Second, to investigate the effect of abstract structure on sentence priming, we will compare the priming and no-priming conditions in the same word order: Passive-Passive vs. Ba-Passive. Finally, to examine the effect of surface word order, we will compare the same word order condition with a different one: Ba-Passive vs. Active-Passive. Regarding the expectations, if the shared-syntax account involves processing both surface word order and abstract structure, we expect the strongest repetition suppression effects in comparison: Passive-Passive > Active-Passive, in both pars opercularis of IFG and anterior STG. Alternatively, if the shared-syntax account only involves surface word order or abstract structure, then the comparisons: Passive-Passive > Ba-Passive and Ba-Passive > Active-Passive will show repetition suppression effects in the corresponding brain regions, the pars opercularis of IFG or the anterior STG, and these effects will be weaker than those in the former comparison. We hope these findings will enhance our understanding of the neural mechanisms in bilingual sentence production by exploring the interaction between surface word order and abstract structures in the brain.
Topic Areas: Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics, Language Production