Crosslinguistic effects in the priming of novel grammatical structures and the psycholinguistic mechanisms of language change

Abstract To identify potential psycholinguistic mechanisms by which structural innovations are reproduced across different types of speakers, this study systematically investigates crosslinguistic effects in the structural priming of novel grammatical structures among first-language (L1) German and L1 Swedish speakers of English compared to L1 English speakers. For novel uses of the double object (DO) structure with English nonalternating verbs (e.g. donate the woman the book ), three experiments find direct and indirect crosslinguistic effects in the within-language and cross-language priming of structural innovations. Co-activation of a high-frequency structural option in the first language promotes the production of structural innovations. We relate these findings to language change and argue that crosslinguistic activation may render bilingual speakers accelerators of language change.