Priming Cross-Linguistic Interference in Spanish-English Bilingual Children

While it is a defining fact of bilingualism that bilingual speakers know two languages, the way that those languages are organized in the mind is far from self-evident. Hypotheses about bilingual grammatical architecture range from the claim that there must be two separate grammars, one corresponding to each language (Genesee, Nicoladis, & Paradis, 1995; De Houwer, 2005), to the position that there is only one grammar, parts of which are used by one language alone but much of which overlaps (‘shared-syntax’: Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004). While it is possible in principle for each language to be represented in its own isolated module, certain aspects of bilingual language use suggest that there is at least some degree of grammatical overlap between the two languages, both during development and in adulthood. For example, children and adults alike are susceptible to structural priming between their two languages, reusing a structure recently heard in one language in a production in the other. Identifying the nature of structural environments in which crosslinguistic influence can occur is critical for determining the extent of grammatical overlap in the bilingual mind, which in turn places a substantial constraint on explanations of language development in this population. One potentially restricting case for grammatical sharing concerns structures that are grammatical in only one of a speaker’s two languages, e.g., a verb-final embedded clause for a German-English bilingual. Bilingual adults generally do not experience overt structural intrusions from one language into the other (Grosjean, 1989), but children sometimes do (e.g., Döpke, 1998). This indicates that at some point the overlap between language representations may extend even to structures that should be associated with one language only. If this overlap does exist, then it should be possible to elicit the production of