A SEPARATE OR SHARED SYNTAX: SYNTACTIC PROCESSING IN BILINGUALS

The objective of the present article is to provide, from a psycholinguistic perspective, an overview of the recent literature on bilingual syntactic processing in production and comprehension. More specifically, the article aims at presenting the contributions of the syntactic priming paradigm to the study of syntactic processing in L1 and L2 by reviewing studies conducted in Brazil and abroad. Syntactic priming refers to the facilitated processing of grammatical structure due to some previously processed information or structure and it is a promising tool to study whether syntax is shared or separate in bilinguals. At the cross-linguistic priming level, the studies reviewed report robust syntactic priming effects during production. Overall, studies show cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects on different structures and different language-pairings. Production data suggests links between the L1 and L2 syntactic representations. Comprehension data remains a matter of debate.