This project has two goals. First, it aims to adjudicate between these three
theories. This is why it will test specific predictions of these theories with respect to the
language match/mismatch of the prime language – target language pair (i.e., withinlanguage
vs. between-language priming), proficiency, and linguistic distance in crosslinguistic
syntactic priming experiments. Second, the project aims to develop existing
theories further by considering syntactic representation and processing from a
developmental perspective. Existing theories make claims about the static situation of a
multilingual who has acquired a second language years ago, but they leave it very much
unclear how a second-language learner forms syntactic representations in the course of
the developmental trajectory. In Hartsuiker et al.’s account, for example, there is a shared
syntactic representation at the end of this trajectory. But it is not clear whether
representations are shared from the very beginning of acquisition on, or whether sharing
only takes place after exposure to a sufficiently large number of relevant sentences in
both languages. This is why the project will develop a new paradigm in which
participants will learn an artificial language (e.g., Marcus et al., 1999). At several
moments in the learning process, we will conduct a priming task between the artificial
language and Dutch, so that we can study the extent of cross-linguistic influences as a
function of the developmental trajectory and can exert rigorous experimental control on
the syntactic properties of the new language and on the conditions under which the
participants learn that language.