Cross-linguistic structural priming of innovations in Canadian French

Abstract 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.