Syntactic Priming in Language Acquisition: Representations, Mechanisms and Applications

Syntactic priming is a naturally-occurring psycholinguistic phenomenon that has been used as an experimental manipulation to great effect: over the last 20 years, syntactic priming research with children of different backgrounds has added to our understanding of the mechanisms and stages of syntactic development and priming. This collection of original articles explores the state of the art in that literature. Ten chapters review the findings of syntactic priming research with monolingual and multilingual, typically-developing and atypically-developing child populations from a variety of language backgrounds. The expert authors explore what syntactic priming has revealed about children's development of syntax and propose ways in which methodological innovations and broadening the scope of future research can build on this. The collection will be a useful resource for researchers from diverse areas of the field of child language, particularly those with a focus on grammatical development.