Publications

Language learners have to both segment words and discover grammatical rules connecting those words in sentences. In adult listeners, the presence of a prosodic cue in the speech stream, for example, a pause, appears to facilitate rule-learning of non-adjacent dependencies of the form AiXCi (Peña et al., 2002). Only when listening to the artificial language containing pauses, could participants identify rule-words of the form AiAjCi or AiCjCi, ...

Cross-linguistic structural priming effects suggest that bilinguals have shared or connected memory representations for similar syntactic structures. This predicts an influence of the production preferences of one language in the other language (Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2018). We hypothesized that shared structures will lead to a facilitatory effect on production frequencies, whereas connected structures may sometimes lead to an inhibitory ...

When learning a language, one needs to acquire the grammatical structures of the new language. Using structural priming, I studied how mental representations of such syntactic structures are formed during the process of learning a language, and how the syntactic representations of one language affect the syntactic representations of another language. Previous production studies suggest that L2 learners might start with item-specific and ...

The developmental account of second language (L2) syntactic acquisition in late learners (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2017) predicts that learners start with item-specific syntactic representations, which become abstract over time. We investigated how the transition between item-specific and abstract syntactic representations takes place for transitive structures in a within-Dutch structural priming experiment. In a longitudinal and a ...

Although structural priming seems to rely on the same mechanisms in production and comprehension, effects are not always consistent between modalities. Methodological differences often result in different data types, namely choice data in production and reaction time data in comprehension. In a structural priming experiment with English ditransitives, we collected choice data and reaction time data in both modalities. The choice data showed ...