What Affects Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Priming? The Impact of Word Order Similarity, Thematic Alignment, and Typological Distance on Bilingual Structural Priming

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_3How to use a DOI?

Keywords

cross-linguistic syntactic priming; bilingualism; word order similarity; thematic alignment; typological distance

Abstract

This review synthesizes current findings on the key factors that influence cross-linguistic syntactic priming in bilingual speakers. It aims to assess whether shared syntactic representations underlie bilingual sentence production and how these are shaped by linguistic and cognitive factors. Specifically, it focuses on three major dimensions: word order similarity, thematic alignment and event structure, and typological distance. Findings across recent studies suggest that while surface-level syntactic overlap may facilitate priming, it is not a necessary condition. Instead, conceptual mappings such as agent–patient alignment and event-based structures appear to provide a more robust foundation for structural alignment. Typological distance, although not eliminating priming, modulates its strength and consistency depending on language pair characteristics and speaker experience. This review contributes to a more nuanced understanding of bilingual syntactic processing and highlights the need for further research on typologically distant language pairs such as Chinese and English.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Minjun Zhao
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/13
TI  - What Affects Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Priming? The Impact of Word Order Similarity, Thematic Alignment, and Typological Distance on Bilingual Structural Priming
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language and Cultural Communication (ICLCC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 11
EP  - 20
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_3
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_3
ID  - Zhao2026
ER  -