Book Review: Katherine Messenger (Ed.), Syntactic Priming in Language Acquisition: Representations, mechanisms and applications

Abstract

Syntactic Priming in Language Acquisition, edited by Katherine Messenger, is a thorough and insightful overview of how a widely used experimental paradigm has been adopted and adapted in child acquisition research. Its wide scope includes typically developing monolingual children, bilingual children and children with language and communication difficulties.From the onset, Messenger explicitly focuses on syntactic priming as an experimental paradigm and seeks to differentiate it from earlier work with children, which involved modelling and imitation of verbal behaviour. She also draws a distinction between structural and syntactic priming and focuses on the latter. This is considered a more specific and experimentally controlled paradigm of priming involving the repetition of sentences with a specific syntactic structure (e.g. passives) as opposed to other more implicit forms of structural priming. Beyond the introductory chapter, the book is divided into two broad sections; the first one examines how syntactic priming has been used with typically developing children, while the second one reviews its use with bilingual children or children with atypical language development. Two main themes permeate the majority of the volume's contributions; first, based on research so far, priming is viewed as an example of implicit learning; second, priming is presented as a means of furthering our knowledge and understanding in the field of language acquisition. Proposals to this end include diversifying the languages and linguistic features tested, enhancing the ecological validity of studies and conducting more work that explores individual differences as mediators of priming effects.Chapters 2 to 5 make up the first section on priming used in the context of typically developing monolingual children. In Chapter 2, Contemori provides an introductory overview of the paradigm and outlines its value in establishing that young children have abstract syntactic representations. Contemori introduces the uncontroversial notion that syntactic priming reflects a form of learning and evaluates how lexical overlap between prime and target impacts priming effects. Skipping to Chapter 4, Messenger provides a comprehensive summary of various theoretical models and evaluates their predictions.