Neuroscience

Biology

Politics

Germination

Philosophy

Cognition

Political science

Cognitive psychology

Psychology

Representation (politics)

Second language

Computer science

Linguistics

Botany

Priming (agriculture)

Mental representation

Bilingualism Language and Cognition

In this review, we examine how structural priming has been used to investigate the representation of first and second language syntactic structures in bilinguals. Most experiments suggest that structures that are identical in the first and second language have a single, shared mental representation. The results from structures that are similar but not fully identical are less clear, but they may be explained by assuming that first and second language representations are merely connected rather than fully shared. Some research has also used structural priming to investigate the representation of cognate words. We will also consider whether cross-linguistic structural priming taps into long-term implicit learning effects. Finally, we discuss recent research that has investigated how second language syntactic representations develop as learners’ proficiency increases.

Structural priming in bilinguals