This study investigates cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children, examining whether activation of a bilingual’s other language or a structure from that language leads to differences in the magnitude of cross-linguistic influence. We triangulate evidence from both across-language and within-language priming experiments conducted with 36 Italian–Greek bilingual children aged 7 to 11. We designed the priming experiments to prime the verb-subject-object (VSO) word-order – an inappropriate structure in Italian but grammatical in Greek – following a VSO in Italian or in Greek. We observed a gradual increase in VSO production in Italian throughout the tasks, particularly in the across-language priming experiment. The results are discussed in terms of implicit learning mechanisms underlying priming and the connectedness of syntactic representations in bilingual grammar, supporting a model of cross-linguistic influence in which both structure and language activation play a role. Effects of age and dominance in Greek varied between the two priming conditions.

中文翻译：

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语言和结构激活解释了跨语言对双语语言生产的影响：来自语言内部和跨语言启动的证据


本研究调查了双语儿童的跨语言影响，检查了双语儿童的另一种语言或该语言的结构的激活是否会导致跨语言影响程度的差异。我们对 36 名 7 至 11 岁的意大利语-希腊双语儿童进行的跨语言和语言内启动实验的证据进行了三角测量。我们设计了启动实验来启动动词-主语-宾语 （VSO） 词序——在意大利语或希腊语中是一个不合适的结构，但在希腊语中是语法上的。我们观察到在整个任务中意大利语中 VSO 的产生逐渐增加，尤其是在跨语言启动实验中。结果从启动背后的内隐学习机制和双语语法中句法表征的连通性方面进行了讨论，支持了一个跨语言影响模型，其中结构和语言激活都起作用。年龄和希腊语优势的影响在两种引发条件之间有所不同。