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Teenage kicks: Exploring shared syntax through bidirectional crosslinguistic priming

Evidence from Polish-English bilingual adolescents and adults

ORCiD logo with link | University of Reading | UiT The Arctic University of Norway
ORCiD logo with link | University of Huddersfield | University of Warwick
 | University of Reading | University College London
ORCiD logo with link | University of Warwick | Lancaster University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Reading.

Published online: 25 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.24010.ser
Abstract
A developmental account of how bilinguals organise syntactic knowledge is crucial to understanding their mental representations. While adult studies suggest that syntactic representations can be shared across languages, evidence from child and adolescent heritage speakers remains limited and mixed. We conducted two syntactic priming experiments with adolescent heritage speakers of Polish in the UK (N = 35, mean age = 15;3) to test whether they would produce (1) relative clauses (RCs) instead of adjectival phrases for attributive relationships, and (2) possessor-second structures for possessive relationships with referential possessors, following cross-linguistic priming. A third experiment tested first-generation Polish-speaking adult immigrants in the UK (N = 32) on the same tasks. Adolescents were resistant to priming for RCs, whereas adults showed bidirectional priming. Both groups were primed to produce possessor-second structures only in Polish, where this is the canonical word order. Results indicate that increased proficiency and language experience facilitate priming for less frequent, complex structures like RCs, supporting shared syntax only in adults. For highly frequent constructions like possessives, where Polish and English differ in word order, priming occurred only when consistent with the language-specific preference. This underscores the role of frequency, canonicity, and complexity in shaping bilingual syntactic representations across development.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Shared representations of syntax in bilingual speakers
    • 1.2Developmental evidence for shared syntax
    • 1.3The present study
  • 2.Experiment 1 — attributive constructions
    • 2.1Method
      • 2.1.1Participants
      • 2.1.2Design
      • 2.1.3Materials
      • 2.1.4Procedure
      • 2.1.5Coding
    • 2.2Results and analysis
    • 2.3Discussion
  • 3.Experiment 2 — possessive constructions
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Design
      • 3.1.3Materials
      • 3.1.4Procedure
      • 3.1.5Coding
    • 3.2Results and analysis
    • 3.3Discussion
  • 4.Experiment 3 — adult participants
    • 4.1Method
      • 4.1.1Participants
      • 4.1.2Design, materials and procedure
    • 4.2Results and analysis
      • 4.2.1Vocabulary test
      • 4.2.2Attributive priming task
      • 4.2.3Possessives priming task
      • 4.2.4Comparison of teen and adult participants
    • 4.3Discussion
  • 5.General discussion
    • 5.1Syntactic alternations with equivalent structures: Attributives
    • 5.2Syntactic alternations without equivalent structures: Possessives
    • 5.3Limitations
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Data availability
  • Acknowledgments
  • CRediT author statement
  • Notes
  • References
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