Chapter 2
Syntactic priming and child language competence
A critical review and methodological considerations for future research
Theories of language development differ on how the development of syntax and its mapping to semantics are
conceived. An important question in child language research is about the nature and scope of children’s syntactic
representations and how they develop over time. In the last sixteen years, there has been a growth in research on syntactic
priming in children, testing the abstractness and development of the sentence representations of young and older children to
address theories of language acquisition. In the present paper, I review existing research using the syntactic priming
technique with children. As the number of researchers employing this experimental technique continues to grow, I highlight the
importance to focus on understudied languages, expand the research to a wider range of syntactic structures, uncover the role
of individual differences and adopt structural priming in more naturalistic settings, to elucidate further the mechanisms
underlying language acquisition and development.
Article outline
- What is structural priming?
- Theoretical contributions of structural priming in child language acquisition: The nature of early syntactic representations
- Other theoretical contributions
- Comprehension vs. production priming
- Structural priming as implicit learning and the lexical boost
- Structural priming and individual differences
- Conclusions and future directions
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References