This study investigated whether structural priming, as a reflection of error-driven learning mechanisms, could facilitate second language (L2) learning of the dative alternation in Mandarin. We sought evidence of learning from both priming and acceptability judgment data. Participants were 25 native speakers and 41 classroom learners (CLs). After a priming session in which participants predicted and then saw what a virtual partner had written to describe pictures (prime trials, with only acceptable verb-dative pairings), CLs showed increased production of these acceptable pairings and increased acceptability ratings for them. The observation of such longer-term priming effects beyond the priming phase, together with an inverse frequency effect of priming observed among the CLs, aligns well with error-driven learning accounts. However, we did not find evidence for statistical preemption, in that participants did not decrease ratings for unacceptable pairings as a result of exposure to their competing alternatives.

When speaking or writing, people tend to re-use the syntactic structures they recently encountered (structural priming). Individuals differ in the extent to which they are primed (primeability). Previous research has suggested that perspective-taking, that is, the ability to imagine the feelings, thoughts and perceptions of others, predicts the magnitude of priming in adults. The present study investigates if this also holds for monolingual and bilingual children. We primed the possessive structure in monolingual Dutch children and bilingual children with varying L2s. There was individual variation in children’s primeability in both groups. For both monolinguals and bilinguals, we found that the better children were at perspective-taking, the more likely they were to be primed. Dutch language proficiency also influenced children’s primeability: higher language proficiency resulted in more priming in both groups. The findings suggest that structural priming serves a social function which is mediated by perspective-taking abilities.

Cross-linguistic structural priming effects suggest that bilinguals have shared or connected memory representations for similar syntactic structures. This predicts an influence of the production preferences of one language in the other language (Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2018). We hypothesized that shared structures will lead to a facilitatory effect on production frequencies, whereas connected structures may sometimes lead to an inhibitory effect due to competition between structures. We compared the production preferences and priming effects in Dutch for the frequent by-phrase-final and the uncommon by-phrase-medial passive between Arabic/Berber–Dutch and Turkish–Dutch heritage speakers and native speakers of Dutch. Arabic/Berber–Dutch speakers produced more agentless passives –that is, the alternative shared between their two languages. In contrast, Turkish–Dutch speakers produced less by-phrase-medial passives, although these are less uncommon in Turkish. This inhibition effect suggests that syntactic structures may sometimes be connected rather than shared, although the exact mechanisms behind the inhibitory effects require further research.

Many cross-language sentence processing studies showed structural priming, which suggests a shared representation across languages or separate but interacting representations for each language. To investigate whether multilinguals can rely on such representations to predict structure in comprehension, we conducted two visual-world eye-tracking priming experiments with Cantonese–Mandarin-English multilinguals. Participants were instructed to read aloud prime sentences in either Cantonese, Mandarin, or English; then they heard a target sentence in Mandarin while looking at the corresponding target picture. When prime and target had different verbs, there was within-language structural priming only (Mandarin-to-Mandarin, Experiment 1). But when prime and target had translation-equivalent verbs, there was not only within-language but also between-language priming (only Cantonese-to-Mandarin, Experiment 2). These results indicate that structure prediction between languages in comprehension is partly lexically-based, so that cross-linguistic structural priming only occurs with cognate verbs.

The shared-syntax account of bilingual syntactic representations suggests that similar structures from different languages are represented as one in the bilingual mind. In this study, we examined the degree of morpho-syntactic similarity needed for representations to be shared in the bilingual mind by comparing passive structures in Greek and English. Contrary to English, non-active morphology in Greek is not restricted to passives and the “by phrase” is considered marked. In two structural priming experiments, we examined whether passives can be primed in L1-Greek and, subsequently, whether there is a single representation for passives in Greek–English bilinguals despite distributional and morpho-syntactic differences. Results showed that passive structures were primed in L1-Greek (Experiment 1) and from L1-Greek to L2-English (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that morpho-syntactic and distributional differences inherent to passives do not prevent priming, and that structural representations can be shared even when featural structure is not identical.

Syntactic structures and meaning appear to independently contribute to structural priming within English structural alternations. Japanese uses scrambling of case-marked phrases to create syntactic alternations, and it is not clear how meaning impacts scrambling-based structural choices. To examine this issue, meaning overlap with dative targets was manipulated in two structural priming experiments. In Experiment 1, datives primed dative targets, but structurally similar primes with idiomatic meanings did not prime. In Experiment 2, transitive primes that differed from datives in thematic roles showed as much priming as dative primes. The transitive results demonstrate that scrambling-based alternations in Japanese can be primed from structures that differ in role meaning, but the lack of idiom priming means that these structures may be less independent of meaning than those in other languages.

We investigated L1 and L2 frequency effects in the sharing of syntax across languages (reflected in cross-linguistic structural priming) using an artificial language (AL) paradigm. Ninety-six Dutch speakers learned an AL with either a prepositional-object (PO) dative bias (PO datives appeared three times as often as double-object [DO] datives) or a DO dative bias (DOs appeared three times as often as POs). Priming was assessed from the AL to Dutch (a strongly PO-biased language). There was weak immediate priming for DOs, but not for POs in both bias conditions. This suggests that L1, but not AL, frequency influenced immediate priming. Furthermore, the DO bias group produced 10% more DOs in Dutch than the PO bias group, showing that cumulative priming was influenced by AL frequency. We discuss the different effects of L1 and AL frequency on cross-linguistic structural priming in terms of lexicalist and implicit learning accounts.

Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers sometimes misinterpret temporarily ambiguous sentences like “When Mary dressed the baby laughed happily.” Recent studies suggest that the initially assigned misinterpretation (“Mary dressed the baby”) may persist even after disambiguation, and that L2 speakers may have particular difficulty discarding initial misinterpretations. The present study investigated whether L2 speakers are more persistent with misinterpretation compared with L1 speakers during sentence processing, using the structural priming and eye tracking while reading tasks. In the experiment, participants read prime followed by target sentences. Reading times revealed that unambiguous but not ambiguous prime sentences facilitated processing of the globally correct interpretation of ambiguous target sentences. However, this priming effect was only observed when the prime and target sentence shared the same verb. Comprehension accuracy rates were not significantly influenced by priming effects but did provide evidence of lingering misinterpretation. We did not find significant L1/L2 differences in either priming effects or persistence of misinterpretation. Together, these results suggest that initially assigned misinterpretations linger in both L1 and L2 readers during sentence processing and that L1 and L2 comprehension priming is strongly lexically mediated.

Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories based on explicit judgments about patterns of acceptability – whereas it is the task of psychologists to determine how language is processed, and that in doing so, they do not typically question the linguists' representational assumptions. We challenge this division of labor by arguing that structural priming provides an implicit method of investigating linguistic representations that should end the current reliance on acceptability judgments. Moreover, structural priming has now reached sufficient methodological maturity to provide substantial evidence about such representations. We argue that evidence from speakers' tendency to repeat their own and others' structural choices supports a linguistic architecture involving a single shallow level of syntax connected to a semantic level containing information about quantification, thematic relations, and information structure, as well as to a phonological level. Many of the linguistic distinctions often used to support complex (or multilevel) syntactic structure are instead captured by semantics; however, the syntactic level includes some specification of “missing” elements that are not realized at the phonological level. We also show that structural priming provides evidence about the consistency of representations across languages and about language development. In sum, we propose that structural priming provides a new basis for understanding the nature of language.

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.

Structural priming is the phenomenon that speakers tend to re-use structures they have recently comprehended or produced themselves. Most studies on this topic are experimental and looked at within-language priming. However, there are now also many observational studies, a development that is inextricably related to new/larger corpora, new statistical methodologies, and new theoretical ideas. Second, there is a growing body of research on cross-linguistic structural priming, though mostly experimental. These developments lead to a new potential research avenue: cross-linguistic priming on the basis of observational data. Here, we will first summarize some fundamental studies of cross-linguistic priming, and then trace the historical development of observational studies of structural priming to showcase how statistical and theoretical developments have shaped research on priming in general and discuss what such observational priming research has offered to within-language priming research. We end with a discussion of how this research can inform cross-linguistic priming.

We investigated trial-by-trial and cumulative cross-language effects of structural priming and verb bias on L1 and L2 dative syntactic choices (e.g., ‘boy-give-ball-to-girl’ [PO structure] vs. ‘boy-give-girl-ball’ [DO structure]). Dutch-dominant Dutch–English bilinguals listened to a prime sentence with a DO or PO structure in one language and then described a picture in the other language, using verbs that varied in their bias towards the PO or DO structure in Dutch and English. We found effects of cross-language structural priming and verb bias on syntactic choice, some of which were influenced by the participants’ language dominance. In addition, we found cumulative forms of structural priming, leading to cross-language priming effects between experimental blocks. We discuss these results in terms of models on the representation of lexical and syntactic information in bilinguals, and point out how the observed effects can be related to experience-based mechanisms of language use and contact-induced language change.

According to Hartsuiker et al.'s (2004) shared-syntax account bilinguals share syntactic representations across languages whenever these representations are similar enough. But how does such a system develop in the course of second language (L2) learning? We will review recent work on cross-linguistic structural priming, which considered priming in early second language learners and late second language learners as a function of proficiency. We will then sketch our account of L2 syntactic acquisition. We assume an early phase in which the learner relies on transfer from L1 and imitation, followed by phases in which language- and item-specific syntactic representations are added and in which such representations become increasingly abstract. We argue that structural priming effects in L2 (and between L1 and L2) depend on the structure of this developing network but also on explicit memory processes. We speculate that these memory processes might aid the formation of new representations.

We investigate here the contribution of code-switching and structural priming to variable expression of the Spanish first person singular subject pronoun in the New Mexican bilingual community. Comparisons with both Spanish and English benchmarks indicate no convergence of Spanish toward English grammar, including in the presence of code-switching, where the linguistic conditioning of variant selection remains unaltered. We find a language-internal and cross-language priming effect, albeit of differing strength, such that speakers’ preceding coreferential (Spanish and English) subject pronouns favor subsequent pronouns, whereas unexpressed subjects tend to be followed by unexpressed subjects. Given the rarity of unexpressed subjects in English, in the presence of code-switching fewer tokens occur with unexpressed primes. Thus, code-switching has no intrinsic effect. Instead, it results in associated shifts in the distribution of contextual features relevant to priming, contrary to the convergence-via-code-switching hypothesis and in accordance with the contextual distribution-via-code-switching hypothesis, which we put forward here.

A structural priming experiment investigated whether bilingual speakers’ processing of their non-native language (L2) depends entirely on their experience of L2, or whether it is also affected by their experience of the native language (L1). German-L1 and Spanish-L1 proficient speakers of English (and English-L1 controls) described pictures of dative events after reading unrelated sentences that had a Prepositional Object (PO) or Double Object (DO) structure. Participants in all three groups were more likely to produce DO descriptions after reading DO sentences than PO sentences. Crucially, Spanish-L1 speakers, whose L1 allows PO but not DO structures, showed the same pattern of priming as German-L1 speakers, whose L1 allows both structures. Additionally, the groups showed no difference in their baseline preference for DO structures. We suggest that in proficient bilinguals, processing in L2 is not affected by L1 experience and L1 preferences, and propose a model to account for our findings.

In two experiments, we tested the role of lexical repetition, cognates, and second language (L2) proficiency in the priming of code-switches, using the structural priming technique. Dutch–English bilinguals repeated a code-switched prime sentence (starting in Dutch and ending in English) and then described a target picture by means of a code-switched sentence (also from Dutch into English). Low- and high-proficient speakers of L2 English were tested in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. We found that the participants’ tendency to switch at the same position as in the prime sentence was influenced by lexical repetition between prime sentence and target picture and by the presence of a cognate in prime and target. A combined analysis showed that these lexical effects were stronger in the high-proficient than in the low-proficient L2 speakers. These results provide new insights into how language-related and speaker-related variables influence code-switching in sentences, and extend cognitive models of lexical and combinatorial processes in bilingual sentence production.