Abstract
Syntactic Priming in Language Acquisition: Representations, Mechanisms and Applications, edited by Katherine Messenger, is a welcoming and reader-friendly volume that takes a comprehensive look at syntactic priming in child populations, in response to growing concerns about children's syntactic acquisition and development in the field of child language. Structural priming is a psycholinguistic phenomenon in which repeated exposure to a given syntactic structure in subsequent utterances influences how that syntactic structure is processed and produced (Branigan, 2007). Organized into 10 chapters, the book covers up-to-date studies written by 17 professional contributors on monolingual and bilingual syntactic priming with typically and atypically developing young populations.
As a leading section, the first chapter written by Messenger introduces the application of syntactic priming in child language acquisition given its utility in investigating syntactic representations and language learning. Then it offers an informative overview of such issues within three key themes concerning syntactic priming within and across languages with typically and atypically developing children. It elaborates on the aim of this volume to persuade the readers that syntactic priming can be used as a device and a model to understand how children acquire languages, through testing what they already know, and how they learn to utilize language grammar during sentence processing as well as explaining the mechanisms that contribute to this.
Chapters 2 to 5 focus on syntactic priming among typically developing monolingual children. Contemori in Chapter 2, considers the nature of children's early representations of syntax and suggests extending syntactic priming studies to more languages, structures, and contexts so as to better understand the effects of syntactic priming in children's syntactic development. As another line of research on the nature of children's developing representations, Foltz discusses interactions between syntactic priming and other linguistic domains in Chapter 3, which has implications for the mechanisms behind children's syntactic priming, the acquisition of the syntax, and the development of their mental grammar. Chapter 4 describes another direction of children's syntactic priming studies: implicit learning models of syntactic priming. Messenger, Branigan, Buckle, and Lindsay focus on the crucial interaction between age and priming effects, suggesting that learning from syntactic priming connects with learnability and prior knowledge of the language. Leading on methodological innovation, Atkinson examines children's syntactic priming of a less-studied syntactic structure (i.e., prepositional phrase attachment) with comprehension priming tasks, in Chapter 5. The results confirm the bidirectional priming effects of English children's interpretations of prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities.
In Chapter 6, Gámez, Vasilyeva, and Perry introduce the shared syntax account in the development of bilingual children. The fully shared nature of bilingual syntax is especially more common for bilingual children at their school ages. Using a syntactic priming paradigm, Serratrice explains crosslinguistic influence in the grammatical development of young bilinguals and argues its promising potential for childhood bilingualism research in Chapter 7.
Given the supportive priming effects in the syntactic acquisition of typically developing children, its potential in language impairments and therapies among nontypically developing children are also discussed in the final three chapters. Chapter 8 focuses on children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Hopkins reviews related syntactic priming studies on autistic children and explains the contribution of syntactic priming to language atypicality and communication difficulties. It is shown that verbal difficulty in autistic children cannot be rigidly attributed to imitation deficits in language because priming effects in those with autism indicate that syntactic priming could be used for measuring language impairments. Chapter 9 by Garraffa and Smith focuses on children with developmental language disorder (DLD). This chapter explores the rationale behind and supports the view that learning mechanisms of syntactic priming contribute to the grammatical acquisition of children with DLD. Syntactic priming can also be utilized as a window for language therapy. In the last chapter, Leonard, Krok, and Wisman Weil review existing studies on syntactic priming with grammatically impaired children to support the idea that syntactic priming has the potential to be included as part of clinical practice in speech and language therapy and then suggest concrete implementations of syntactic priming in clinical settings and potential directions for future research on this topic.
With a clear structure and thorough view in each chapter, the book brings together both theoretical frameworks and methodological innovations in syntactic priming among typically and atypically developing young populations. It enables the reader to have a deep and comprehensive understanding of the nature of children's syntactic representations, typical and atypical grammar acquisition, and development by systematically reviewing existing literature, broadening the scope of potential research directions, and providing a valuable resource for ongoing studies in child language. In general, this book serves as a thought-provoking guiding read for psycholinguistic researchers, language educators, and speech and language therapists who might utilize it as a window to direct their own research, teaching practices, and clinical interventions in the field of child language, especially grammatical acquisition and development.