A key question in the study of language representation in bilinguals is whether knowledge is shared across languages. Crosslinguistic syntactic priming has been widely used to test bilingual adults’ shared representations, but studies with child bilinguals are few and have several limitations.

We addressed these limitations in two studies with Polish–English bilingual children aged 5–11 years (N=96). We investigated bidirectional priming across languages and within each language for a structural alternation with syntactic overlap (attributive constructions) and one without structural overlap (possessive constructions).

Bidirectional crosslinguistic priming was found for possessives but not for attributives. Within-languages, there was priming for possessives and attributives in both languages. Priming was not related to children's age, vocabulary, or language dominance scores.

We show that representations can be selectively shared between languages at the construction level. The extent to which young bilinguals have shared representations depends on the frequency and complexity of structures in each language.

双语者语言表征研究的一个关键问题是知识是否可以跨语言共享。跨语言句法启动已被广泛用于测试双语成人的共同表征，但针对儿童双语者的研究很少，并且存在一些局限性。

我们在两项针对 5-11 岁波兰语-英语双语儿童的研究中解决了这些局限性（N=96）。我们研究了跨语言和每种语言内部的双向启动，以实现具有句法重叠（定语结构）和无结构重叠（所有格结构）的结构交替。

发现所有格有双向跨语言启动，但没有发现定语。在语言内部，两种语言都有所有格和定语的启动。启动与儿童的年龄、词汇量或语言优势得分无关。

我们表明，表示可以在构建级别的语言之间有选择地共享。年轻的双语者共享表征的程度取决于每种语言结构的频率和复杂性。