Structural priming occurs when speakers reproduce recently experienced sentence structures. Structural priming experiments with adults have demonstrated that the adult production system is sensitive to abstract representations of sentences. Moreover, the existence of cross-modal priming suggests that the representations are abstract enough to be shared between comprehension and production. This proposal seeks funding to investigate structural priming with first language learners aged 2;6-4, both within modality (from production to production) and across modalities (from comprehension to production). Results are expected to shed light on the organization of the child's developing language comprehension and language production systems and the relationship between them. Three hypotheses are tested: 1) the hypothesis that structural priming stimulates learning; 2) the hypothesis of continuity between child and adult language, specifically, that the processing systems of children and adults are organized in qualitatively similar ways; and 3) the hypothesis of shared representations, that a subset of the representations used in language production are shared with language comprehension.
