Investigation of cross-language structural priming between Korean and English passives during comprehension

Abstract

This study examines cross-language structural priming between Korean andEnglish in highly proficient Korean-English bilinguals. A self-paced reading experimentwas conducted to investigate whether structural priming occurs in passive constructionsfrom L1 Korean to L2 English. Results revealed no significant difference in reading timesfor English passives between passive and unrelated prime conditions, suggesting anabsence of structural priming from Korean passives to English passives. Notably,however, reading times for English passive targets were significantly longer followingKorean active primes than after either passive or unrelated primes. This is likely dueto interference between the syntactic representations of the two languages. These findingssupport the connected-syntax model, suggesting that while syntactic representations inKorean-English bilinguals are distinct, they interact during sentence processing.