Chapter 7. What can syntactic priming tell us about crosslinguistic influence?

Abstract

When a child is simultaneously exposed to two different languages, they will need to parse the incoming input, and map form to meaning to create mental representations that are consistent with those of the adult speakers of those languages. How exactly bilingual children do this, the extent to which they develop linguistic systems that are independent of each other, and the place of crosslinguistic influence, are still the object of much current research. Syntactic priming is a promising methodology to test different hypotheses about the (relative) interdependence of bilingual children’s linguistic systems. Starting with a historical perspective on the one vs. two systems hypothesis in bilingual development, I consider the limits of crosslinguistic influence, then I make a proposal on how co-activation and syntactic priming could explain crosslinguistic influence.