Syntactic representations for the three languages in Chinese-English-French trilinguals:Evidence from cross-linguistic priming
This study investigates whether syntax is shared between the first language(L1)and third language(L3)and between the second language(L2)and L3 as well as what factors influence syntactic representations for the three languages in Chinese-English-French trilinguals.Two cross-linguistic syntactic priming experiments were conducted with trilinguals with high and low L3 proficiency.The results show that cross-linguistic syntactic priming occurred between L1 and L3 in both the high and low L3 proficiency groups,but such a priming effect was not observed between L2 and L3 in either group.These findings indicate that during the learning process,a shared syntactic representation is first achieved between L1 and L3,while the syntactic representations of L2 and L3 remain independent,largely owing to relatively low L2 proficiency.The results also suggest that the influence of L1 on syntactic representations for the three languages is stronger than that of word-order similarity.Based on these findings,this study extends the shared syntax account across languages(Hartsuiker et al.2016).Because of the stable syntactic representation of L1,the corresponding structures in L1 and L3 usually share a syntactic representation even if the word orders between the two languages are not identical.In contrast to L1 and L3,the sharing of syntactic representations of equivalent structures in L2 and L3 largely depends on L2 proficiency.Therefore,whether there is a shared syntactic representation for all three languages of trilinguals may vary greatly depending on the circumstances.
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