Shared Syntax in Turkish-English Bilinguals

A question of interest in bilingualism research is whether each language has a unique mental representation or whether they share a mental representation. Syntactic priming studies with bilinguals suggest that structural knowledge is shared between languages. This interaction between the two languages is called “shared syntax.” However, these studies have not shown the same effect for typologically dissimilar languages. The current study aims to create an extension of syntactic priming studies by using a specific bilingual population: simultaneous interpretation students. Simultaneous interpreters are well-known for their high proficiency. Thus, interpreters are an ideal participant group to be tested in order to test the validity of the shared syntax account for typologically different languages. This study presents different bilingual populations that have not been heavily investigated. In this respect, it will be one of the few studies that have tested the shared syntax account in Turkish with simultaneous interpretation students.