SYNTACTIC PRIMING AND SENTENCE REPETITION IN BILINGUAL CZECH/ENGLISH AND CHINESE/ENGLISH PRESCHOOLERS. AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION.

Abstract

This thesis used the syntactic priming paradigm to test the abstractness of children’s sentence representations in production. The experiment was modeled on Bencini and Valian’s (2008) priming study with 3-year-olds' and carried out with a group of Czech/English bilingual children aged from 3 to 5 years. During the experimental session, participants were asked to hear and repeat a prime sentence, either in the active or passive form, and then describe an unrelated target picture. The experiment found abstract priming of passives between sentences that shared only structure and differed in lexical content. In describing target pictures with inanimate participants, 11 children primed with passives significantly produced more passive sentences than did 11 children primed with actives. The findings would indicate that children represent syntactic forms at an abstract level, independent of particular lexical items. Accordingly, they provide support for continuity in language development.