Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Cross-linguistic Priming in Comprehension of the Logical Form" "Robert Hartsuiker" "Department of Linguistics, Department of Experimental psychology" "Many researchers have investigated whether a bilingual has one mental linguistic system in which both languages are stored, or whether a bilingual has separate linguistic systems for each language. My proposed research investigates such bilingual linguistic systems, but on a level of language that has not received much attention in research on bilingualism before. This level is the level of the 'Logical Form' (LF), which determines the interpretation of a sentence. If a sentence is ambiguous, it has multiple LFs, as each interpretation has its own LF. The key question in this research is to investigate whether bilinguals have one shared representation of the LF for both languages, or separate representations of the LF for each language. This can be studied by using priming studies. Priming refers to the effect that a stimulus is processed more easily after exposure to a similar stimulus. Such priming effects can occur on the level of the LF, as people process a certain interpretation of an ambiguous sentence more easily after exposure to that interpretation. In this research, bilinguals need to process an ambiguous sentence in one language, after exposure to one possible interpretation of that sentence in another language. Thus, this research investigates whether priming effects on the LF level hold cross-linguistically. If this is the case, it suggests that bilinguals make use of the same representation for all languages, and thus have one shared representation of the LF." "Auditory word recognition by bilinguals." "Robert Hartsuiker" "Department of Experimental psychology" "This project has two goals. First, it aims to adjudicate between these three theories. This is why it will test specific predictions of these theories with respect to the language match/mismatch of the prime language U+2013 target language pair (i.e., withinlanguage vs. between-language priming), proficiency, and linguistic distance in crosslinguistic syntactic priming experiments. Second, the project aims to develop existing theories further by considering syntactic representation and processing from a developmental perspective. Existing theories make claims about the static situation of a multilingual who has acquired a second language years ago, but they leave it very much unclear how a second-language learner forms syntactic representations in the course of the developmental trajectory. In Hartsuiker et al.U+2019s account, for example, there is a shared syntactic representation at the end of this trajectory. But it is not clear whether representations are shared from the very beginning of acquisition on, or whether sharing only takes place after exposure to a sufficiently large number of relevant sentences in both languages. This is why the project will develop a new paradigm in which participants will learn an artificial language (e.g., Marcus et al., 1999). At several moments in the learning process, we will conduct a priming task between the artificial language and Dutch, so that we can study the extent of cross-linguistic influences as a function of the developmental trajectory and can exert rigorous experimental control on the syntactic properties of the new language and on the conditions under which the participants learn that language." "Development of shared syntactic representations in second language acquisition." "Robert Hartsuiker" "Department of Experimental psychology" "Our project investigates the acquisition of syntactic representations in a second language. We test a theory that proposes a process of increasing syntactic abstraction both within and between languages (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2016). We therefore follow subjects during 10 weeks as they learn an artificial learning; we use cross-linguistic structural priming to test the degree of abstraction across languages."