Syntactic Representation of Bilinguals: A Case Study of Thai-Chinese Unbalanced Bilinguals

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ศันสนีย์ เอกอัจฉริยา

Abstract

This research aims to discuss whether Thai-Chinese unbalanced bilinguals who possess low proficiency in Chinese stored syntactic representation of both Thai and Chinese together or separate. The experiment tested Active-Passive structures through Cross-linguistic Structural Priming. It was found that low-proficiency Thai-Chinese unbalanced bilinguals, after hearing passive primed sentence in Thai produced Chinese passive sentences more than after hearing active sentences. This implied that Thai-Chinese unbalanced bilinguals tended to store similar structures of Thai and Chinese together. It also supported the Language Transfer theory in Second Language Acquisition.

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