Structural priming in the presence of a lexical-functional split: A closer look at Media Lengua
In structural priming, syntactic structures are influenced by the abstract syntactic structure of prior sentences. Previous research shows that priming is stronger when content lexical items are repeated from prime to target (lexical boost). How does structural priming affect a mixed language, incorporating vocabulary from one source language but grammar from another?
This study investigates structural priming in Media Lengua, a mixed language spoken in Highland Ecuador, showing OV/VO word order variation. The findings indicate that repeated verbs significantly boosted the odds of the less common word order (VO); lexical boost from other content items was negligible. Furthermore, priming effects were stronger for the canonical OV variant and grew with continued exposure throughout the task. This suggests that mixed languages are robust against priming of non-canonical variants even in the presence of perfect (cognate) lexical boost, implying that cognate lexical roots have separate rather than shared syntactic representations.
