Syntactic Priming of Passives in Late Bilinguals: Evidence from Italian L1–Spanish L2 Speakers

Recent psycholinguistic research has focused on second language (L2) processing. In particular, Hartsuiker et al.’s article Is Syntax Separate or Shared Between Languages? (2004) triggered an influential debate on the mental mapping of grammar(s) in bilingual brains. The findings of the present dissertation aim to contribute to this body of research, particularly by informing the separate-to-shared-syntax account of the multilingual mind elaborated by Bernolet et al. (2013), which posits that highly proficient bilinguals develop integrated syntactic representations which allow for cross-linguistic activation and interaction. The theoretical framework also draws on network models of language production (Bock & Levelt, 1994) and residual activation accounts of syntactic priming (Pickering & Branigan, 1998). We conducted a structural priming experiment with 59 Italian native speakers (L1) who learned Spanish as a foreign language (L2). Employing a picture description task, we investigated whether the production of passive sentences in Spanish was facilitated after reading and repeating out loud a passive sentence in Spanish or Italian. Results revealed significant syntactic priming both within and across languages, with stronger effects in the L2-L2 task than in its L1-L2 version. Higher L2 proficiency was associated with increased priming, particularly in the cross-linguistic task, suggesting that proficiency can facilitate the activation of shared syntactic representations. Animacy of the patient had an additive effect on passive production, increasing overall passive rates without modulating priming strength. These findings indicate that bilingual syntactic representations are hierarchically organised and partially shared across languages, and that structural choice is sensitive to semantic cues and proficiency factors. Overall, the study provides evidence for dynamic cross-linguistic integration in sentence production and highlights the interplay of proficiency, semantic salience, and syntactic activation in the bilingual mind.