Structural priming is the tendency to unconsciously reproduce previously experienced structures, irrespective of lexical information. Furthermore, when the prime (previously-experienced sentence) and target (currently-produced sentence) verb is shared, the priming effect is enhanced (i.e., lexical boost). Such effects evidence the presence of abstract structural representations and play a crucial role in the understanding of how structures are processed and reproduced as well as which factors can contribute to these effects.

There is a vast body of English and Dutch literature showing structural priming effects in adults and children, when using ditransitive structures (double object (DO): The man gives the woman the letter vs. prepositional object (PO): The man gives the letter to the woman) which show that both children and adults have abstract structural representation. However, the lexical boost effect has always been found in adults, but with respect to children, this effect has been found in some studies, but not in others questioning the processing analogy between children and adults.

Moreover, in English and Dutch the two dative structures are more or less balanced in use, and presumably also in strength of mental representations. Far less research has been carried out in languages where one structural option is strongly preferred. Investigating priming effects in speakers of such structurally biased languages is important, because the two syntactic representations have considerably different mental strengths. This is likely to have important implications for processing theories on priming.  Also, little research exists on how priming affects bilingual children given that their abstract representations may well be weaker than those of their monolingual peers. Accordingly, there are no studies looking at the initial structural preferences in German speaking bilingual children and how these preferences are affected by priming.

In this project, together with Caroline Rowland (Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen) and Michelle Peter (University of Liverpool), we focus on the development of abstract structural representations in German, where the DO structure is strongly preferred. We have tested German and bilingual (L2 German, L1 other than German) children in the age range between three and eight years of age which we then compare to an adult control group.  In contrast, to English child studies, we have added an older age group (7-8 years of age) in order to better estimate the developmental trajectory. This work has important implications for existing processing theories on structural priming for both monolingual and bilingual speakers and is supposed to shed more light on the nature of abstract representation at each point over development.

Conference Presentations

2019

Kholodova, A., Rowland, C., Peter, M., & Allen, S. (September 2019).  Structural priming in a structurally biased language: Investigating abstract representations in bilingual children compared to monolingual children over development. Poster at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing Conference (AMLaP), Moscow, Russia.

2018

Kholodova, A., Rowland, C., Peter, M., & Allen, S. (November 2018).  Implicit learning and surprisal effects in a structurally biased language: A developmental study. Poster at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, USA.

Kholodova, A., Rowland, C., Peter, M., & Allen, S. (September 2018). Investigating implicit learning and surprisal effects in a structurally biased language over development. Presentation at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing Conference (AMLaP), Berlin, Germany.

Kholodova, A., Rowland, C., Peter, M., & Allen, S. (April 2018). Syntactic priming in a structurally biased language: Investigating abstract representations in monolingual and bilingual children over development. Presentation at the Transdisciplinary Approaches to Language Variation (TALV), Tromso, Norway

2017

Kholodova, A., Rowland, C., Peter, M., & Allen, S. (October 2017) Syntactic priming in a structurally biased language: Investigating processing mechanisms over development. Presentation at Many Paths to Language (MPaL), Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Kholodova, A., Rowland, C., Peter, M., & Allen, S. (September 2017). Ditransitive syntactic priming in a biased language: Investigating abstract representations over development. Presentation at the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) 50th annual meeting. Zürich, Switzerland.

Kholodova, A., Rowland, C., Peter, M., & Allen, S. (September 2017). Syntactic priming in a structurally biased language: Investigating abstract representations over development. Presentation at the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech (ISMBS). Chania, Crete, Greece.

Kholodova, A., Rowland, C., Peter, M., & Allen, S. (May 2017). Syntactic priming in a strongly biased language: Investigating Continuity of processing mechanisms. Presentation at the Linguistic Diversity Meets The Brain (LDMTB): Future Directions in the Language Sciences. Zürich, Switzerland.

2014

Kholodova, A. & Allen, S. (July 2014). Cross-linguistic structural priming in German-English bilingual children. Presentation at Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Language Learning and Processing (CLiP). Tübingen, Germany.

Kholodova, A. & Allen, S. (April 2014). A cross-linguistic study on the Dative alternation: Structural Priming in German-English bilingual children. Presentation at the Sprachwissenschaftliche Tagung für Promotionsstudierende (STaPs) - Linguistic Science Conference., 5. Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany.