Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in bilingual children

Abstract

Previous research has used cross-linguistic priming methodology with bilingual adults to explore the nature of their syntactic representations. The present paper extends the use of this methodology to bilingual children to investigate the relation between the syntactic structures of their two languages. Specifically, we examined whether the use of passives by the experimenter in one language primed the subsequent use of passives by the child in the other language. Results showed evidence of syntactic priming from Spanish to English: hearing a Spanish sentence containing a passive led to the increase in children's production of the parallel structure in English. However, there was no priming in the other direction: hearing an English sentence containing a passive did not increase children's use of the parallel structure in Spanish. These results provide evidence for both the integration of syntactic representations in bilingual children and the asymmetry of the relation between their two languages.

Exploring the role of cognitive control in syntactic processing

“…previous research shows that priming occurs between two languages only if the prime structures have the same word order, which is the case for the forms tested in our study; in addition, Vasilyeva et al (2010) and Hervé et al (2015) show that priming is not equally effective when the primed word order leads to pragmatically odd structures in the target language. Based on this evidence, we suggest that inhibition is only triggered when there is a structural or pragmatic mismatch between the prime and the target language.…”

“…However, it does not affect the activation of the shared grammar, resulting in a comparable priming effect in the two conditions. We offer two possible explanations: first, we speculate that the activated abstract representation for datives is not specified for language and therefore is not affected by language control mechanisms during bilingual exchanges; second, based on previous findings (Hartsuiker et al 2004;Vasilyeva et al 2010;Hervé et al 2015), we argue that structural similarity and pragmatics play a crucial role in crosslanguage priming. Also, language control and executive control overlap, but only partially.…”

“…Another possibility is that 33 inhibitory mechanisms only prevent access to the shared syntactic representations when the prime and target are not an equally good option in the two languages. Accordingly, Vasilyeva et al (2010) were not able to prime fue-passives from English to Spanish and Hervé et al (2015) report that the effect of priming is significantly weaker when the primed structure is not pragmatically felicitous in the target language. In the latter study, English-French bilinguals produced pragmatically odd left-dislocations in English as a result of priming, but the effect was significantly weaker than in French, where priming did not lead to the production of inappropriate forms.…”

“…To our knowledge, these include Vasilyeva, Waterfall, Gámez, Gómez, Bowers and Shimpi (2010), Hsin, Legendre and Omaki (2013) and Hervé, Serratrice and Corley (2015). Vasilyeva et al (2010) tested passive voice in 65 English-Spanish bilingual children aged 5;2 to 6;5 using bidirectional priming (English to Spanish and Spanish to English). The two languages have similar passive structures (e.g., 'The tree was broken by the lightning bolt'/El árbol fue quebrado por el rayo).…”

“…However, they did produce some se-passives. Vasilyeva et al (2010) propose that this asymmetry may result from the fact that fue- the two languages is that left dislocated elements tend to be old information in French, whereas left dislocation is used to introduce new referents in English. Therefore, there is structural overlap, but the factors governing the two variants differ across the two languages.…”