We investigated syntactic priming in German children to explore crosslinguistic evidence for implicit learning accounts of language production and acquisition. Adult descriptions confirmed that German speakers (N=27) preferred to spontaneously produce active versus passive transitive and DO versus PO dative forms. We tested whether German-speaking children (N=29, Mage=5.3, 15 girls/14 boys) could be primed to produce these dispreferred forms and whether such priming effects would persist across a target phase. Children first heard a block of priming sentences and then described a block of target pictures. They demonstrated significant priming effects for passive and PO dative structures, and these priming effects did not differ between the first and second halves of the block of target trials. These patterns of German child language production are consistent with implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming.

This study is a corpus-based investigation of the use of the V-final (VF) order in Old English conjunct (or coordinate) clauses. The aim of the analysis is to determine which of the two hypotheses formulated in earlier studies of the subject finds more convincing data support in the available corpora of Old English. According to one interpretation, conjunct clauses are a subtype of main clauses, and the VF order is used in both groups to signal continuation in discourse, especially with punctual, dynamic and relatively heavy verbs. Under the other view, VF conjunct clauses are syntactically subordinate, with the coordinating conjunction blocking verb movement like a complementiser. The present study shows that while both hypotheses are descriptively adequate, the main mechanism responsible for the use of the VF order in conjunct clauses is syntactic priming, with the VF order activated by a trigger clause (usually subordinate) and spreading to the following conjunct clause(s), which often results in long chains of subsequent VF clauses.

The Mandarin Ba-construction is one of the most challenging constructions for L2 learners. The present study attributes the difficulty in developing the taxonomic representation of the Ba-construction to the interference of competing constructions. I conducted a syntactic priming experiment to investigate the representational relationship between the Ba-construction and its SVO counterpart in native Mandarin speakers and L2 Mandarin learners with or without the equivalent of the Ba-construction in their L1. It was found that native speakers and L2 learners whose L1 features a structure equivalent to the Ba-construction represented the two constructions distinctly, manifesting as a resistance to priming and a robust syntactic preference for the Ba-construction in the picture description task. Conversely, L2 learners whose L1 does not possess an equivalent of the Ba-construction were sensitive to syntactic priming, which indicates a lack of taxonomic representations of the Ba-construction in relation to its SVO counterpart. Such reduced differentiation between the two target constructions suggests a blocking effect that stems from L1 interference.

We used a multi-method approach to investigate how children avoid (or retreat from) argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g., *You giggled me). Experiment 1 investigated how semantic and statistical constraints (preemption and entrenchment) influence children’s and adults’ judgments of the grammatical acceptability of 120 verbs in transitive and intransitive sentences. Experiment 2 used syntactic priming to elicit overgeneralisation errors from children (aged 5–6) to investigate whether the same constraints operate in production. For judgments, the data showed effects of preemption, entrenchment, and semantics for all ages. For production, only an effect of preemption was observed, and only for transitivisation errors with intransitive-only verbs (e.g., *The man laughed the girl). We conclude that preemption, entrenchment, and semantic effects are real, but are obscured by particular features of the present production task.

Native speakers show rapid adjustment of their processing strategies and preferences on the basis of the structures they have recently encountered. The present study investigated the nature of priming and adaptation in second-language (L2) speakers and, more specifically, whether similar mechanisms underlie L2 and native language adaptation. Native English speakers and Korean L2 learners of English completed a written priming study probing the use of double object and prepositional phrase datives. Both groups showed cumulative adaptation effects for both types of dative, which was stronger for the structure that was initially less frequent to them (prepositional phrase datives for the native English speakers, and double object datives for the L2 learners). This supports models of priming that incorporate frequency-based modulation of long-lasting activation of structures. L2 learners and native speakers use similar processing mechanisms; differences in adaptation can be accounted for by differences in the relative frequency of structures.

A cross-linguistic structural priming experiment explores the issue of whether parallel syntactic constructions of the two languages in bilinguals share a representation when the surface word orders of the constructions differ. The target population was early balanced bilinguals of Korean and English; the tested constructions were structures relevant to the subject-to-object raising (STOR) operation, which until this study have not been used for structural priming research in cross-linguistic contexts (e.g., STOR: Mary believes Jerry to be trustworthy; non-STOR: Mary believes that Jerry is trustworthy). These syntactic structures exist in both English and Korean, but with different surface word orders. The results show that cross-linguistic priming of the STOR construction occurred, suggesting that parallel syntactic constructions of the languages in bilinguals can share a representation independent of surface word order.

Research on word production in bilinguals has often shown an advantage for cognate words. According to some accounts, this cognate effect is caused by feedback from a level that represents information about phonemes (or graphemes) to a level concerned with the word. In order to investigate whether phonological feedback influences the selection of words and syntactic constructions in late bilinguals, we investigated syntactic priming between Dutch and English genitive constructions (e.g., the fork of the girl vs. the girl's fork). The head nouns of prime and target constructions were always translation equivalents. Half of these were Dutch–English cognates with a large phonological overlap (e.g., vork–fork), the other half were non-cognates that had very few phonemes in common (e.g., eend–duck). Cognate status boosted between-language syntactic priming. Further analyses showed a continuous effect of phonological overlap for cognates and non-cognates, indicating that this boost was at least partly caused by feedback from the translation equivalents’ shared phonemes.