Abstract
Many cross-language studies showed structural priming suggesting a shared representation across languages or separate but interacting representations for each language. To investigate whether multilinguals can rely on such representations to predict structure in comprehension, we conducted two visual-world eye-tracking priming experiments with Cantonese-Mandarin-English multilinguals. Participants were instructed to read prime sentences in either Cantonese, Mandarin, or English; then they heard a target sentence in Mandarin while looking at the corresponding target picture. When prime and target had different verbs, there was within-language structural priming only (Mandarin-to-Mandarin) and no interaction between verb bias and prime structure (Experiment 1). But when prime and target had translation-equivalent verbs, there was not only within-language but also between-language priming (only Cantonese-to-Mandarin, Experiment 2). These results indicated that structure prediction between languages in comprehension:1) is independent, so that prediction errors do not generalize between languages;2) is partly lexically-based, so that cross-linguistic structural priming only occurred with cognate verbs.
Key words: multilingualism; structural priming; sentence comprehension