title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Lynch School of Education, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA. vasilyev@bc.edu
authors.forename: Marina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vasilyeva
authors.forename: Heidi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Waterfall
authors.forename: Perla B
authors.initials: PB
authors.lastname: Gámez
authors.forename: Ligia E
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Gómez
authors.forename: Edmond
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bowers
authors.forename: Priya
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Shimpi
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004739:England; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D012660:Semantics; D013030:Spain