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The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms (i.e., active/passive for transitive; double-object/prepositional for dative). Children were then asked to describe pictures identical to those shown in the corresponding baseline procedure. In both transitive and dative conditions, 4-year-old children were more likely to use a particular syntactic form if it had been used by the experimenter. Three-year-old children did not show priming effects, but their production of transitive sentences was higher following transitive primes than in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, an additional group of 3-year-olds participated in a procedure in which they repeated the experimenter's sentences before describing the pictures. This procedure yielded significant priming effects for transitive and dative forms. These results indicate that very young children possess abstract syntactic representations, but that their access to these representations is sensitive to task demands.

In previous studies, very young children have learned words while “overhearing” a conversation, yet they have had trouble learning words from a person on video. In Study 1, 64 toddlers (mean age = 29.8 months) viewed an object-labeling demonstration in one of four conditions. In two, the speaker (present or on video) directly addressed the child and in two, the speaker addressed another adult who was present or was with her on video. Study 2 involved two follow-up conditions with 32 toddlers (mean age = 30.4 months). Across the two studies, the results indicated that toddlers learned words best when participating in or observing a reciprocal social interaction with a speaker who was present or on video.

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Previous research has used cross-linguistic priming methodology with bilingual adults to explore the nature of their syntactic representations. The present paper extends the use of this methodology to bilingual children to investigate the relation between the syntactic structures of their two languages. Specifically, we examined whether the use of passives by the experimenter in one language primed the subsequent use of passives by the child in the other language. Results showed evidence of syntactic priming from Spanish to English: hearing a Spanish sentence containing a passive led to the increase in children's production of the parallel structure in English. However, there was no priming in the other direction: hearing an English sentence containing a passive did not increase children's use of the parallel structure in Spanish. These results provide evidence for both the integration of syntactic representations in bilingual children and the asymmetry of the relation between their two languages.