This paper has been a long time in the make. Data collection was completed before the pandemic but with everything that the lockdowns entailed, the distraction of many other projects, and a less than positive editorial experience at one journal, I am more than delighted to say that my first priming paper has now been accepted for publication in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.

Here’s the abstract: This paper investigates the role of structural priming in cross-linguistic influence, a well-established yet poorly understood characteristic of bilingual language development. More specifically, we test the proposal that cross-linguistic influence may be conceptualized as between-language priming, that is, as the result of prior linguistic exposure (Serratrice, 2016) and shared syntactic representations between languages (Hartsuiker et al., 2004). In Experiment 1, we primed bilingual English-Dutch children between languages using possessive structures (e.g., the astronaut’s dog, the dog of the astronaut). In Experiment 2, we compared the same group of children with bilingual Spanish-Dutch and monolingual Dutch children using within-language priming. Within-language priming was stronger than between-language priming. In both experiments, we examined the relation between priming behaviour and individual differences in language exposure, use and proficiency. Experiment 1 found between-language priming with long-lasting effects modulated by proficiency. The results of Experiment 2 were consistent with inverse priming effects in within-language priming modulated – to a degree – by properties of the bilingual children’s other language. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the proposal that between-language priming is a plausible mechanism underpinning cross-linguistic influence and that bilingual children develop shared syntactic representations for structures which are similar across their two languages.

You can access the paper for now at OSF: 10.31219/osf.io/a3nc9