Exploring the role of cognitive control in syntactic processing

Abstract

4In this paper, we explore the role of cognition in bilingual syntactic processing by employing a structural priming paradigm. A group of Norwegian-English bilingual children and an age-matched group of Norwegian monolingual children were tested in a priming task that included both a within-language and a between-language priming condition. Results show that the priming effect between-language was not significantly smaller than the effect within-language. We argue that this is because language control mechanisms do not affect the access to the shared grammar. In addition, we investigate the interaction between the children's performance in the priming task and in a nonlinguistic cognitive task and find that the two measures are not correlated; however, we find a correlation between the cognitive task and language control, which we measured by counting the number of trials produced in the non-target language. Our findings suggest that language control and domain-general executive control overlap only partially.

Shared syntax and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: Evidence from between- and within-language priming

“…This confirms previous findings for bilingual children showing between-language priming with ungrammatical and pragmatically infelicitous structures (Hervé et al, 2016;Hsin et al, 2013;Vasilyeva et al, 2010; see also Wolleb et al, 2018).…”

“…Assuming -for now, at least -that the overall higher rates of within-language priming are a robust finding in need of explanation, they appear more compatible with the account put forward by Cai et al (2011): upon hearing a Dutch prime, children activated the Dutch language node and this in turn activated other lemmas linked to that node, leading to a "within-language boost" (cf. Wolleb et al, 2018).…”

“…Finally, Wolleb, Sorace and Westergaard (2018) included both between-language priming and within-language priming in their study of English-Norwegian bilingual children.…”

Individual differences in structural priming in bilingual and monolingual children: the influence of perspective-taking

“…Additionally, we found that language proficiency predicted the likelihood of children producing full possessive structures as opposed to responses without possessive morphology. This further suggests that the proficiency effect we observed for structural priming may in part reflect children's mastery of the possessive structure (i.e., children need to possess an abstract representation of a structure in order to be able to re-use it; Wolleb et al, 2018). Arguably, children with lower language proficiency are less likely to re-use full structures, independent of perspective-taking abilities, because they have not yet fully mastered the morphology of the structure.…”

What can syntactic priming tell us about crosslinguistic influence?

“…In adult bilingual speakers (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2017 -for an overview) syntactic priming effects have been shown both within-and across languages, leading to the formulation of the shared syntactic structure hypothesis (Hartsuiker et al, 2004). A few studies have used crosslinguistic priming in studies with bilingual children to investigate the extent to which structures may be shared across languages in younger bilinguals (Gámez & Vasilyeva, 2020;Hsin et al, 2013;Vasilyeva et al, 2010;Wolleb et al, 2018), but so far only one has used it to investigate CLI (Hsin et al, 2013). In this chapter I will argue that crosslinguistic syntactic priming is a promising theoretical framework and methodology to address the issue of shared syntactic structures and CLI in childhood bilingualism.…”