Abstract:
Subject pronoun expression has been thoroughly studied for effects of language contact, but it is fairly recent that these studies started including cross-linguistic structural priming paradigms. In a structural priming experiment, we investigated the on-going change in subject pronoun use in Turkish spoken in the Netherlands in both monolingual and bilingual settings. 28 Turkish-Dutch bilinguals listened to stories which primed them with a Turkish sentence containing either a null or an overt subject pronoun. After each story-prime pair, they provided a response in Turkish as if they were directly talking to an interlocutor from the story. A mixed-effects logistic regression analysis revealed that overt subject pronouns were more likely to be used in the bilingual setting following a prime sentence with an overt than a null pronoun. Our findings strengthen the empirical basis of how structural priming influences syntactic choices in language contact settings.
