Crosslinguistic Priming in German-English Bilingual Children

Recent syntactic priming studies show that bilingual adults share structural representations at least to some degree for their two languages when L1 and L2 share word order patterns (Loebell & Bock, 2003; Hartsuiker et al., 2004). However, little research has been carried out on structural representations in bilingual children.

The current project thus addresses three central questions:
1.  How do priming processes differ in monolingual and bilingual children compared to adults?
2.  Do bilingual children share structural representations for their two languages?
3.  How do priming and sharing of structural representations develop in children?
 
Investigating cross-linguistic influence in structural representations of bilingual children will extend explanations for language development in this population and shed further light on how grammatical units are organized in their mental representations.

In a production study using ditransitive structures with monolingual English-speaking children aged 3 to 6 years, Rowland and colleagues (2012) found priming effects that increased with age and that were stronger when prime and target shared the same verb. In the present project, conducted in collaboration with Michelle Peter and Caroline Rowland (University of Liverpool), we are using the same paradigm to assess the priming effect in monolingual German-speaking children, and then to test cross-linguistic priming in German-English bilingual children. Importantly, German and English share the same word order for both variants of the ditransitive structure:

double object (DO):  Mary  sent  John  a  letter.
              Mary  schickte  John  einen  Brief.

prepositional object (PO):  Mary  sent  a  letter  to  John.
                                  Mary  schickte  einen  Brief  an  John.

As background, we are conducting two studies to glean information about exposure to and preference for PO and DO structures in German-speaking children and adults. The first is a picture description task with native German-speaking adults; the second is a corpus analysis of child and caregiver speech in German data in the CHILDES database.

The results of the ongoing work will contribute to a better understanding of how priming processes affect language production in children, especially with regard to whether and how structural representations are shared across languages.