On the relation between cross-linguistic influence, between-language priming and language proficiency: priming of ungrammatical adjective placement in bilingual Spanish-Dutch and French-Dutch children

Abstract

Bilinguals are often considered to develop shared syntactic representations between their languages. Evidence for shared syntax typically comes from between-language priming studies showing that exposure to a structure in a bilingual’s one language can prime the subsequent use of the same structure in the other language. In turn, between-language priming of shared structures can have long-term consequences, explaining an intensively studied phenomenon in the field of bilingualism: cross-linguistic influence. Virtually all available studies on between-language priming have focussed on structures that are present in both languages of the bilingual population tested. However, cross-linguistic influence has been found to result in ungrammatical structures as well. In this study, we investigated whether it is possible to prime ungrammatical adjective placement between a Romance language (French and Spanish) and a Germanic language (Dutch) in Spanish-Dutch and French-Dutch bilingual children. In addition, we studied the effect of language proficiency on the strength of such between-language priming. Finally, we tested whether priming of ungrammatical structures is the result of shared or separate-but-connected syntactic representations. Our results show between-language priming of ungrammatical adjective placement from Spanish and French into Dutch. The lower children’s proficiency in their languages, the stronger the priming effect was. These findings follow the proposal that between-language priming can account for cross-linguistic influence, including ungrammatical structures. Furthermore, we believe our results of ungrammatical priming are best explained by separate-but-connected syntactic structures.

Asymmetrical effects of cross-linguistic structural priming on cross-linguistic influence in L2 learners

“…For instance, English-Spanish bilingual children aged 4-5 years produce significantly more ungrammatical prenominal attributive adjectives in Spanish following an English sentence with a prenominal attributive adjective than a neutral English sentence with a predicative adjective (Hsin et al, 2013). In a similar study, van Dijk and Unsworth (2022) also report that child bilinguals produce ungrammatical postnominal adjectives Dutch to larger degrees when primed with this word order in Spanish or French. These studies show that priming can elicit CLI at greater levels than would surface in (unprimed) production among child bilinguals.…”

“…L2 learners and bilingual speakers sometimes use properties of their other language(s) in the comprehension and production of one language. At the grammatical level, a "syntactic accent" (MacWhinney) characterizes both early bilinguals (van Dijk et al, 2022) and late L2 learners (Yu & Odlin, 2016) to different degrees. In beginning learners, such effects have been modeled as the representational transfer of the L1 grammar into the interlanguage of learners (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) or as learned attention of L2 learners to L1 cues and constructions (e.g., Ellis & Wulff, 2020).…”

Language processing in bilingual children

“…Together, results on lexical and (morpho)syntactic coactivation suggest that bilingual children's languages interact during language processing and that both their lexicons and syntactic systems are integrated (Hervé et al, 2016;Unsworth, 2023;van Dijk & Unsworth, 2023, but see Hao et al, 2023.…”