Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies…

This study investigated cross-linguistic priming in six-year-old, balanced Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 60). We examined bilinguals' production of transitive forms in English (active, passive) after exposure to Spanish transitives (Study 1; M age = 6.2 years; SD = 0.3) and their production of transitive forms in Spanish (active, passive) after…

Purpose: This study was specifically designed to examine how verb variability and verb overlap in a morphosyntactic priming task affect typically developing children's use and generalization of auxiliary IS. Method: Forty typically developing 2- to 3-year-old native English-speaking children with inconsistent auxiliary IS production were primed…

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…

To what extent can second language (L2) speakers acquire a syntactic representation for an L2 structure absent in the first language (L1)? Findings from L2 structural priming studies are in conflict inasmuch as evidence for and against continuity between L1 and L2 sentence production has been shown. Furthermore, previous investigations have not…

Producing a sensible utterance requires speakers to select conceptual content, lexical items, and syntactic structures almost instantaneously during speech planning. Each language offers its speakers flexibility in the selection of lexical and syntactic options to talk about the same scenarios involving movement. Languages also vary typologically…

This study investigated the long-term effect of classroom-based input manipulation on children's use of subordination in a story re-telling task; it also explored the role of receptive vocabulary skills and expressive grammatical abilities in predicting the likelihood of priming. During a two-week priming phase, 47 monolingual English-speaking…

Although the syntactic priming methodology is a promising tool for language acquisition researchers, using the technique with children raises issues that are not problematic in adult research. The current paper reports on an individual differences study that addressed some of these outstanding issues. (a) Does priming purely reflect syntactic…

Priming methodology was previously used to investigate children's ability to represent abstract syntactic forms. Existing evidence indicates that following exposure to a particular syntactic structure (such as the passive voice), English-speaking children increase their production of that structure with new lexical items. In the present work, we…

Gender priming studies have demonstrated facilitation of noun production following pre-activation of a target noun's grammatical gender. Findings provide support for models in which syntactic information relating to words is stored within the lexicon and activated during lexical retrieval. Priming effects are observed in the context of determiner…

Research on word production in bilinguals has often shown an advantage for cognate words. According to some accounts, this cognate effect is caused by feedback from a level that represents information about phonemes (or graphemes) to a level concerned with the word. In order to investigate whether phonological feedback influences the selection of…

This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children's use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking 5-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story-retelling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test 1,…

We report a replication and extension of Ferreira (2003), in which it was observed that native adult English speakers misinterpret passive sentences that relate implausible but not impossible semantic relationships (e.g., "The angler was caught by the fish") significantly more often than they do plausible passives or plausible or implausible…

Work in experimental psycholinguistics has shown that the processing of coordinate structures is facilitated when the two conjuncts share the same syntactic structure [Frazier, L., Munn, A., & Clifton, C. (2000). "Processing coordinate structures." "Journal of Psycholinguistic Research," 29(4) 343-370]. In the present paper, we argue that this…