Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 16, Issue 4, 2026

Subject pronoun expression (SPE) has been extensively investigated in studies of language contact, with studies finding higher rates of SPE in consistent null subject languages that are in contact with non-null subject languages. Recent studies have explored the role of structural priming in these processes of language change by analyzing different language pairs and societal contexts. We contribute to this line of research by examining the role of structural priming on the SPE rates of three groups of Spanish–English bilinguals: a group of 40 heritage speakers of Spanish living in the U.S., a group of 35 first-generation immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries also living in the U.S., and a group of 60 monolingually-raised speakers of Spanish living in a Spanish-speaking country. Participants completed two production experiments (one with a within-language priming treatment and one with a cross-linguistic priming treatment) as well as a task to control for language dominance. Results showed that SPE rates were significantly higher in the within-language condition than in the cross-linguistic condition. However, the effect did not extend to a post-test task in either experiment. Between-group differences were only found in the within-language condition, with heritage speakers producing the highest SPE rates. Language dominance was not significant.

Language contact can lead to short-term effects like cross-linguistic influence but might also contribute to long-term processes such as contact-induced language change. Recent studies suggest that structural priming may serve as a cognitive mechanism linking synchronic and diachronic outcomes in contact-induced language change since it occurs across languages and persists over time. Heritage language speakers, immersed in extreme language contact situations and often presenting an innovative language use, provide a valuable testing ground of the possible agents that produce and transmit these changes. Moreover, age is also thought to influence speakers’ tendencies to adopt innovative constructions with younger speakers being more accepting than older ones. In this study, we investigate whether priming serves as a mechanism underlying language change and its impact on speakers’ long-lasting linguistic choices. We conducted within and across languages priming experiments on motion event constructions focusing on the differences in the distribution of framing patterns between Italian (verb-framed language) and German (satellite-framed language), testing younger and older Italian HLS living in Germany. Our findings contribute to understanding the mechanisms underlying cross-linguistic influence and its role within language change and identifying its agents, bridging the gap between historical linguistics and psycholinguistic research on bilingual populations.

Research investigating the psycholinguistic foundations of contact-induced grammatical language change suggests that new structures may enter a language through cross-linguistic priming in bilinguals. However, this assumes that priming effects can emerge even for structures which are ungrammatical in the target language. In the present study, we test this assumption by investigating cross-linguistic ungrammatical priming for analytic comparatives between Turkish and German. In a self-paced reading experiment, Turkish–German bilinguals read German target sentences with grammatically incorrect analytic comparatives (e.g., *mehr interessant). These were preceded by a Turkish prime sentence which included a Turkish analytic comparative (daha konforlu) or an otherwise identical indicative control prime (konforlu). The results showed significantly faster reading times for ungrammatical German comparatives following Turkish comparative primes than following indicative primes. In an additional grammaticality-judgement task, Turkish–German bilinguals rated sentences with ungrammatical German analytic comparatives as significantly more acceptable than monolingually-raised German participants. These results suggest that cross-linguistic priming can even occur for ungrammatical structures. We conclude that cross-linguistic ungrammatical priming constitutes a candidate for a mechanism driving contact-induced language change in bilingual individuals.

Intra-individual language contact in bilinguals is considered a potential source for the emergence of structural innovations in a language, eventually leading to grammatical language change. This study investigates the psycholinguistic mechanisms involved in this process, focusing on cross-linguistic structural innovation priming. In a web-based self-paced reading experiment with production pre- and posttests, we tested Canadian French–English bilinguals on innovative French ditransitive and monotransitive structures primed by English sentences with the same structure or by control primes. No priming effect emerged for monotransitives. For ditransitives, however, reading times in the segment immediately following the innovation were significantly faster when primed by the corresponding English structure. In production, the proportion of innovative sentences did not significantly increase from pretest to posttest for either structure. Yet, production rates of innovative forms in both tasks were modulated by the individual degree of French contact. We discuss these differential outcomes with reference to theoretical accounts of the psycholinguistics of contact-induced change. Overall, these findings suggest that cross-linguistic priming can provide a pathway for structural innovations to enter bilingual grammars, potentially leading to language change. However, such processes are apparently constrained by the linguistic properties of the respective structure.

Previous research has shown that past-tense inflection is particularly difficult for child learners of English whose L1 is Chinese, with persistent omission often attributed to cross-linguistic influence (CLI). Building on this literature, this study investigates how Chinese–English bilingual children in the United States (US, n = 4) realize English past tense in naturalistic production between 2;8 and 6;11, focusing on CLI from their heritage language. We examined 11,682 utterances and identified 1,052 lexical, copular, and auxiliary verb tokens in obligatory contexts for past-tense marking. All four children displayed optional past-tense inflection in some or all observational periods, along with overregularization and a previously unreported pattern of overmarking. The production patterns suggest that the persistent difficulty of the Chinese-L1 learners in an English-dominant context is a result of the lack of tense marking in Chinese and the overall isolating typology of the language, rather than transfer from specific phonological, morphosyntactic, or lexical elements. Our findings show that heritage bilingual acquisition is a manifestation of language contact at the individual level, and shed new light on how language contact may drive language change at the communal level.

This study examined the interplay between cross-linguistic influence, structural priming, and language variation. Specifically, it investigated whether Spanish–Majorcan Catalan bilinguals process expressed and unexpressed object constructions similarly, and whether they show evidence of cross-linguistic influence and synchronic change arising from sustained contact between the two languages. While previous research has examined null-object representations in monolinguals, much less is known about how bilinguals of languages that (dis)allow object omission, process such constructions. To address this gap, forty-three Spanish–Majorcan Catalan bilinguals with varying dominance profiles completed a comprehension-based structural priming task in Spanish. The task included both grammatical and ungrammatical Spanish sentences, the latter incorporating constructions modeled on the prescriptive Catalan partitive clitic en to introduce Catalan-influenced syntax into Spanish. Results revealed differential priming effects for expressed vs. unexpressed objects. Priming effects with ungrammatical constructions further supported an implicit learning account of structural priming. Finally, although not mediated by priming, cross-linguistic influence from Catalan to Spanish indicated ongoing synchronic change in the bilingual grammar of this population. This study underscores the role of individual linguistic experience in shaping bilingual syntactic processing and highlights the need for more experience-sensitive approaches to understanding how contact-induced grammatical convergence develops in bilingual speakers.