Guest speaker: Heeju Hwang (University of Hong Kong)

Our department is delighted to welcome Heeju Hwang, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (2012) and works on language processing, morphosyntax, and acquisition (both L1 and L2). She will be giving a talk on Friday the 7th at 3 PM in SS 560A: "Influence of cumulative L1 syntactic experience on L2 production":

A critical question for psycholinguistic research is how the input shapes language processing. Existing research suggests that speakers’ previous syntactic experience significantly affects their production preferences. For example, speakers are more likely to use a syntactic structure if they have just encountered that structure (e.g., Bock 1986) or have had multiple experiences of it (e.g., Kaschak, Loney, and Borreggine, 2006) within a language. Speakers, however, often learn to speak more than one language and are exposed to both L1 and L2. This raises the question of how speakers adapt their syntactic behavior in a between-language environment: Do speakers integrate L1 syntactic experience into L2 sentence production? The answer to this question holds important implications for the nature of syntactic processing and the interactivity of two languages under a single cognitive system. We aim to address the issue by investigating how speakers’ cumulative experience with a particular syntactic structure in L1 affects subsequent production of that structure in L2. Mandarin (L1) speakers of English (L2) described transitive and ditransitive events in a between-language context of Mandarin and English (Experiment 1) and in a within-language context of Chinese (Experiment 2). We found that Chinese speakers integrated cumulative experience in Chinese into production of not only Chinese but also of English and such adaptation was greater with a less frequent structure. We also found that between-language adaptation was not sensitive to surface word order. We discuss these findings in terms of theories of syntactic priming and bilingual syntactic processing and consider the need for a model that accommodates our findings.