The Effect of Case Marking and Word Order on Structural Priming Among Tibetan–Chinese–English Trilinguals

ABSTRACT Previous studies investigating the role of case marking and word order in cross‐linguistic structural priming have yielded inconsistent findings, largely within bilingual contexts and between typologically closely related languages. The present study extended this line of research into a trilingual context and a typologically distinct language combination by examining cross‐linguistic priming of ditransitive structures among Tibetan–Chinese–English trilinguals. The three languages differ in both case marking (Tibetan has case marking, while Chinese and English do not) and word order (Tibetan is SOV, but Chinese and English are SVO). The results showed reliable priming effects in the tested cross‐language directions (L1/L3 to L2, L1/L2 to L3), providing no evidence that differences in case marking and word order hinder cross‐linguistic structural priming in this trilingual context. The findings further suggested largely shared (L1–L2, L2–L3), and partially connected (L1–L3), representations of ditransitive structures among trilinguals. Additionally, no evidence was found that L3 proficiency modulated the priming effects.