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Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in bilingual children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2009

MARINA VASILYEVA ,
HEIDI WATERFALL ,
PERLA B. GÁMEZ ,
LIGIA E. GÓMEZ ,
EDMOND BOWERS  and
PRIYA SHIMPI
MARINA VASILYEVA*
Affiliation:
Lynch School of Education, Boston College
HEIDI WATERFALL
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Cornell University
PERLA B. GÁMEZ
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago
LIGIA E. GÓMEZ
Affiliation:
Lynch School of Education, Boston College
EDMOND BOWERS
Affiliation:
Lynch School of Education, Boston College
PRIYA SHIMPI
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California at Santa Cruz
*
[*]Address for correspondence: Marina Vasilyeva, Boston College, Campion 239-D, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. tel: (617) 552-1755; fax: (617) 552-1981; e-mail: vasilyev@bc.edu
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , November 2010 , pp. 1047 - 1064
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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