The present study investigated the effect of classroom-based syntactic training on children's abilities to produce passive sentences. Thirty-three monolingual English children (mean age 5;2), were involved in passive-voice training based on storytelling sessions within a priming design. The training was delivered in a classroom setting, with two…

Three experiments on structural priming in Mandarin-speaking 5-year-olds were conducted to test the priming as implicit learning hypothesis. It describes a learning mechanism that acts on a shared abstract syntactic representation in response to linguistic input using an equi-biased Mandarin SVO-"ba" alternation. The first two…

Research on input processing in the acquisition of a non-primary language has rested largely on the assumption that learners use a meaning-based approach as the "default" when processing input (VanPatten, 1996). The study reported here poses a challenge to this assumption: findings show that participants who were absolute beginners used a…