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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 8:5 (2018) ► pp.606–636

Exploring the role of cognitive control in syntactic processing

Evidence from cross-language priming in bilingual children

| University of Reading
| University of Edinburgh
| UiT, the Arctic University of Norway | NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

In this paper, we explore the role of cognition in bilingual syntactic processing by employing a structural priming paradigm. A group of Norwegian-English bilingual children and an age-matched group of Norwegian monolingual children were tested in a priming task that included both a within-language and a between-language priming condition. Results show that the priming effect between-language was not significantly smaller than the effect within-language. We argue that this is because language control mechanisms do not affect the access to the shared grammar. In addition, we investigate the interaction between the children’s performance in the priming task and in a non-linguistic cognitive task and find that the two measures are not correlated; however, we find a correlation between the cognitive task and language control, which we measured by counting the number of trials produced in the non-target language. Our findings suggest that language control and domain-general executive control overlap only partially.

Keywords: Bilingual development, syntactic processing, structural priming
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Bilingual language processing and cognition
  • 3.Structural priming within- and between-language: Activation and processing of shared syntactic representations
    • 3.1Priming in bilingual children
  • 4.Aims and predictions of the present study
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Tasks and procedure
      • 5.2.1Priming task
      • 5.2.2Dimensional change card sort (DCCS)
      • 5.2.3Vocabulary task
    • 5.3Coding
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Analysis 1: Bilingual group
      • 6.1.1Summary
    • 6.2Analysis 2: Bilingual group vs. Monolingual group
      • 6.2.1Summary
    • 6.3Analysis 3: Interaction between Noswitch and DCCS
      • 6.3.1Summary
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 2 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17002.wol
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