Two longitudinal studies investigated the development of syntactic representations in late second language (L2) learners by means of structural priming in an artificial language (AL) paradigm. Several studies found cross-linguistic structural priming in L2 learners, suggesting that they have shared syntactic representations across languages. But how are these shared representations established? Hartsuiker and Bernolet’s (2017) account claims that 1) L2 syntactic representations evolve gradually from being item-specific to more abstract, and that 2) over time these representations are integrated with available native language (L1) representations. We tested predictions of this theory with native Dutch speakers, who acquired the AL in the lab during five sessions by means of a battery of tasks, the last of which was a sentence priming task. The AL syntax resembled Dutch syntax. We manipulated the relation between prime and target to investigate whether structural priming occurred in conditions with meaning overlap (item-specific) and without overlap (abstract). In Experiment 1, participants responded only in the AL, but in Experiment 2, where the AL was more difficult, the target sentence could also be in Dutch. In both studies, there was an effect of within-language priming and AL-Dutch priming in transitives and ditransitives, but no effect of Dutch-AL priming in ditransitives on Day 1. On Days 2–5, however, priming emerged in most cross-linguistic priming conditions. These findings partly confirm Hartsuiker and Bernolet’s (2017) predictions and suggest that at least for structures that are very similar between languages, shared syntactic representations can be established very early during language learning.

两项纵向研究通过在人工语言（AL）范式中进行结构化启动研究了后期第二语言（L2）学习者的句法表征的发展。几项研究发现，二语学习者采用跨语言结构启动，这表明他们在多种语言之间共享了句法表征。但是如何建立这些共享表示呢？Hartsuiker和Bernolet（2017）的帐户声称1）L2句法表示法已从特定于项目的内容逐渐演变为更抽象的内容，并且2）随着时间的推移，这些表示法已与可用的本地语言（L1）表示法集成在一起。我们用荷兰语母语人士测试了该理论的预测，荷兰语人士通过一系列任务在实验室中获得了AL，他们在五个会话中获得了AL，最后一个任务是句子启动任务。AL语法类似于荷兰语语法。我们操纵了素数与目标之间的关系，以研究结构性素数是否在含义重叠（特定于项目）且没有重叠（抽象）的条件下发生。在实验1中，参与者仅在AL中做出回应，而在实验2中，AL难度更大，目标句子也可能是荷兰语。在两项研究中，在及物动词和双及物动词中都有语言内启动和AL-荷兰语启动的影响，但在第1天，双合动词中的荷兰语-AL引动没有影响。但是，在第2-5天，大多数交叉出现了启动。语言启动条件。这些发现部分证实了Hartsuiker和Bernolet（2017）的预测，并暗示至少对于语言之间非常相似的结构，