On the Limits of Shared Syntactic Representations: When Word Order Variation Blocks Priming Between an Artificial Language and Dutch

Several studies used artificial language (AL) learning paradigms to investigate structural priming between languages in early phases of learning. The presence of such priming would indicate that these languages share syntactic representations. Muylle et al. (2020a) found similar priming of transitives and ditransitives between Dutch (SVO order) and an AL with either SVO or SOV order. However, it is unclear whether such sharing would occur if the AL allows both the same and different word order as the L1. Indeed, the presence of a (easy to share) similar structure might block (i.e., impede) sharing of a less similar structure. Here, we report 2 experiments that each tested 48 Dutch native speakers on an AL that allowed both SVO and SOV order in transitive and ditransitive sentences. We assessed both within-AL and AL-Dutch priming. We predicted (a) priming of both structure and word order within the AL, and (b) weaker AL-Dutch priming from SOV versus SVO sentences due to the presence of SVO sentences in the AL. Indeed, cross-linguistic priming was significantly weaker in SOV versus SVO conditions, but the blocking hypothesis was only supported by the transitive results. Unexpectedly, in the absence of a condition with verb overlap between prime and target sentences, no priming was found in AL and Dutch target conditions without verb overlap (Experiment 1), but priming emerged when a verb overlap condition was added (Experiment 2). This finding suggests that lexical repetition across sentences is crucial to establish abstract syntactic representations during early L2 acquisition.