Effects of intra and translinguistic syntactic priming on the processing of French as L2

We investigated syntactic priming - that is, the facilitation in the processing of a target sentence following processing of a prime sentence that has the same or a similar syntactic structure - within and across languages in Brazilian Portuguese (BP)-L2 French bilinguals during language comprehension. Fifteen adult native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and French as L2 at the intermediate level of proficiency participated in the study. Syntactic priming effects were were elicited in a behavioral experiment that consisted of a self-paced reading task. Results indicated priming effects within language (the L2, French) but not across languages. These effects appear to depend on the repetition of the main verb in the sentence. These results were interpreted as evidence that syntactic priming effects are lexically dependent and, therefore, as support to lexicalist approaches, which posit that all information implicated in syntactic processing is located in syntactic frames stored in the mental lexicon. At the cross-linguistic level, our results suggest separate syntactic systems between the L1 and L2.