Cross-linguistic priming of relative clause attachments in Mandarin-English bilinguals – the effects of branching direction and second language proficiency

In two experiments, we investigated relative clause (RC) attachment priming within Mandarin (L1) and from English (L2) to Mandarin (L1) in Mandarin-English bilinguals. Experiment 1 demonstrates a low-attachment (LA) preference for Mandarin, with significant priming effects influencing the attachment of RC completions. Experiment 2 reveals that higher English (L2) proficiency enhances same-attachment priming from English (L2) to Mandarin (L1), despite the opposite branching directions between two languages. These findings suggest that RC attachments are processed in a hierarchical configuration rather than a linear chunking configuration. Notably, the differential priming effects across L2 proficiency levels further underscore the developmental aspect of L2 language syntactic acquisition and representation. This study sheds light on the hierarchical nature of syntactic representations and their crosslinguistic interactions in bilingual speakers, enriching the discourse on bilingual syntactic processing and structural priming.