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The production of passives by English-Norwegian and Turkish-Norwegian bilinguals: a preliminary investigation using a cross-linguistic structural priming manipulation

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Abstract

This preliminary study tested cross-linguistic structural priming of passives in two groups of adult bilinguals speaking Norwegian-English and Norwegian-Turkish to understand the nature of syntactic mental representations in bilingual minds. Passives in spoken Norwegian are structurally similar to those in English, whereas passives in Turkish are distinct in being morphologically constructed. A shared syntax account based on the similarity of the structures would predict structural priming effects for the Norwegian-English group but not the Norwegian-Turkish group. Results of a computerized picture description task showed that participants provided more active descriptions than passives, but did not indicate any priming in terms of an increased likelihood of repeating the type of the prime they heard in Norwegian in their target picture description in English or Turkish. This can be related to the small sample size or the observation that there were too few passive productions overall. We thus ran an additional analysis which indicated that participants were more likely to produce passives when the target pictures contained inanimate agents. We also ran a separate analysis on Turkish target responses, which did not reveal an effect of prime type on the emphasis of thematic role (agent vs. patient). However, this analysis also showed that pictures with inanimate agents were more likely to be described with target structures emphasizing the patient rather than the agent. We suggest that further research is required to get a clearer picture of the role of the similarity of passives in cross-linguistic structural priming.

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Notes

  1. In another study, Weber and Indefrey (2009) found cross-linguistic structural priming of passives in German-English bilinguals. However, this study investigated priming in comprehension through a self-paced reading task and through neuroimaging. For the purpose of the present study, our focus is on the studies in production.

  2. Also see Vasilyeva et al. (2010) who found cross-linguistic structural priming of passives from Spanish to English but not from English to Spanish in bilingual children.

  3. Also note that in a recent study on structural priming during comprehension, Ziegler and Snedeker (2019) found priming of information structure in the English dative verb alternation.

  4. As for the experimental psycholinguistic investigation of Turkish passives, see e.g. Bayram et al. (2017) for a study on the production of passives in Turkish by heritage speakers in Germany and monolinguals in Turkey. Another study is an unpublished smaller-scale project which looks at structural priming of passives in Turkish children [Kavukcu Atak, N. (2014). Perception and production of Turkish passive forms in 5-year-old preschoolers. Unpublished study. Middle East Technical University, Ankara].

  5. Kornfilt (1997) glosses taraf-ın-dan as side-3SG-ABL. Özsoy (2009) argues that when the complement of the tarafından-phrase is a pronoun, it is overtly marked with the genitive (GEN) case marker -(n)In, whereas when it is a noun, it is marked with the phonologically null abstract GEN marking.

  6. Erguvanlı (1984) also suggests that the preverbal position is associated with the focus and the postverbal is associated with backgrounded information. However, the relationship between word order and information structure is rather complex. Crucially, prosody is also considered to play a role in information structure (for more on the interaction of syntax and intonation regarding information structure, see e.g. İşsever 2003; Kılıçaslan 2004; Özge and Bozşahin 2010).

  7. To be able to compare the English and Turkish productions in a full factorial design, we opted for having equal numbers of animate and inanimate agents and patients in the target pictures.

  8. Turkish sentences such as dalgıç doktor-a ateş ed-iyor (diver doctor-DAT shoot AUX-IMPF, meaning “The diver is shooting the doctor.”) which have DAT-marked objects were also coded as actives as they can be passivized as in doktor-a ateş ed-il-iyor (doctor-DAT shoot AUX-PASS-IMPF, meaning “The doctor is being shot.”).

  9. We have also run the analysis with only the passives overtly expressing the agent, but the results were the same.

  10. We have had two other coders (one for English responses and one for Turkish responses) perform a post hoc blind coding. The inter-rater reliability was equal to or greater than 95% for both English and Turkish data. The items of disagreement were mainly ones classified as “others”.

  11. Of the 19 Turkish passives, six were agentless, four included a tarafından-phrase, six included an ABL (-DAn) NP, two included a DAT (-DA) NP and one included an instrumental NP with -(y)lA/ile. Of the 21 English passives, 17 included a by-phrase, one expressed the agent through the preposition under (for the verb crush) and three were truncated.

  12. We also tested a model with the addition of mean proficiency for Norwegian and mean proficiency in English/Turkish as covariates and their interaction as L2 proficiency has been found to influence cross-linguistic structural priming in bilinguals (Bernolet et al. 2013). These variables were also centered as in Bernolet et al. 2013. However, removing the covariates did not significantly influence model fit. For simplicity of presentation, we limit our scope to the main fixed effects of interest and thus only report the model with prime type and language here.

  13. We also tested but did not get any significant effect for the animacy of the patient. Moreover, the addition of the fixed effect of language of description did not significantly alter the model. For simplicity of presentation, here we interpret the model with only the animacy of the agent as a fixed effect.

  14. It is beyond the scope of the present study to also address “focus” or “new information” which is argued to be indicated by both word order (generally assumed to be the pre-verbal position-Erguvanlı 1984) and prosody (e.g. İşsever 2003). However, focus is an intrinsically inseparable part of information structure and definitely deserves further scrutiny.

  15. Among all the responses including full sentences emphasizing the agent and the patient, there was only one instance of OSV and one instance of OVS word order, the rest were all SOV sentences.

  16. As in the previous analysis, we also tested but did not get any significant effect for the animacy of the patient. For simplicity of presentation, again, we interpret the model with only the animacy of the agent as a fixed effect.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) under the BİDEB 2219 International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship granted for the first author’s postdoctoral research at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing), at the University of Oslo (UiO) (01.05.2014–01.08.2015). The study was conducted on the premises of MultiLing, at UiO, a research center financed by the Research Council of Norway, using the facilities of the center and was thus supported in part by the Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265. We thank MultiLing Theme 1 for a grant for language proofreading services for this paper, as well. We would also like to thank Bernt Brendemoen, Emel Türker, Yeşim Sevinç-Brohet and our colleagues at MultiLing for their helpful comments; Murat Mercan for his assistance with Turkish data coding; Danielle Stephan for language proofreading; and Martin J. Pickering, Mirta Vernice, Robert J. Hartsuiker, and Sarah Bernolet for sharing their stimulus pictures. We are grateful to all the participants who volunteered to take part in this study. Finally, we would like to thank the editors of this special issue and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

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  1. Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Gözde Mercan & Hanne Gram Simonsen

  2. Department of Foreign Language Teaching, Ufuk University, Ankara, Turkey

    Gözde Mercan

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  1. Gözde Mercan
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Mercan, G., Simonsen, H.G. The production of passives by English-Norwegian and Turkish-Norwegian bilinguals: a preliminary investigation using a cross-linguistic structural priming manipulation. J Cult Cogn Sci 3 (Suppl 1), 89–104 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-019-00040-6

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