心理语言学线上论坛 | 5月5日 Robert J. Hartsuiker 教授讲座

Speaker: Robert J. Hartsuiker

Title: Syntactic blocking: When syntactic representations are not shared across languages

Time: 15:00 – 16:30, Wed, 5 May, 2021 

           (Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

            https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

About the speaker

Robert J. Hartsuiker is professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University. He is the President-Elect of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology. He was the editor in chief of the Journal of Cognitive Psychology and an associate editor of Psychological Science. His research focuses on language production and comprehension, control and monitoring of speech, and multilingualism. He has published more than 100 journal papers on these topics in a wide array of journals, including Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Science, Cognition, and Cognitive Psychology. His work is cited more than 9000 times on Google Scholar; his H-index is 48. 

Syntactic blocking: When syntactic representations are not shared across languages

Robert J. Hartsuiker

Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University

Cross-linguistic structural priming suggests that proficient bilinguals share syntactic representations across their languages (e.g., Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004). Such priming can occur even when the syntactic structures are not fully identical in the two languages. The shared representations must therefore abstract across such differences. What then determines whether representations are or are not shared across languages? In this talk, I will propose the syntactic blocking hypothesis, according to which a structure S in one language and a counterpart S’ in another language can only have a shared representation if neither language distinguishes between S and S’. Thus, priming can occur between a passive with SVO structure in one language and one with SOV structure in another language, but not if either language allows both word orders. In that case, the need to distinguish between different word orders blocks the formation of an abstract representation for the passive that is independent of word order. I will discuss structural priming studies using picture description, translation, and artificial language learning tasks that are consistent with the syntactic blocking hypothesis. I will conclude with suggestions to further test this hypothesis.

Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: 

(https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)