Bilingual syntax as implicit learning

This thesis investigated whether bilingual syntax can be explained as error-based implicit learning. The thesis first introduced the Bilingual Dual-path model (Chapter 2) and then used that model to examine bilingual phenomena in sentence processing and production (Chapters 3 to 6), and in acquisition (Chapters 4 and 5). In Chapter 6, the model was used successfully to predict the outcome of a new online structural priming experiment with
human participants.
The results presented in the thesis show that an error-based implicit learning mechanism, instantiated in the Bilingual Dual-path model, accounts for experimental findings on cross-language structural priming and ERPs in L2 learning, and that the model can predict new experimental results on how processing code-switches affects cross-language structural priming. Thus, the thesis has furthered our understanding of a range of bilingual phenomena that play a central role in the psycholinguistic investigation of bilingual syntax, by presenting a plausible underlying mechanism that explains them. At the same time, the thesis has provided further validation for that mechanism.