Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Priming Effect In Chinese Learners Of English

Syntactic priming refers to the tendency for speakers to produce a particular syntactic structure after recent exposure to that structure. It is both a phenomenon as well as a method that can be put into empirical testing in psycholinguistics. By employing syntactic priming experimental paradigms, researchers are able to gain insight into the complex mechanisms of sentence production. Whereas research on syntactic priming has prevailed for decades abroad, it is still immature in China.This study aims to investigate cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Chinese learners of English with a focus on the effect of learner’s proficiency level and sentence structure. Specifically, this study is intended to address two major issues:first, how does learner’s proficiency level affect the priming effect in the process of sentence production; second, how does sentence structure(active sentence and passive sentence) affect the priming effect in the process of sentence production. The experiments adopt confederate scripting technique, which is invented by Branigan,etc., to test the effect of sentence structure(active sentence and passive sentence) and learners’ proficiency on cross-linguistic syntactic priming. Participants are required to describe a picture after they have decided whether the description they hear from their interlocutor match with the relevant picture or not. And each participant is provided with 90 pictures, including 30 target pictures and 60 filler pictures in experiment 1(active sentence priming experiment) and experiment 2(passive sentence priming experiment) respectively. Altogether, 80 Chinese students participate in the experiments. 40 of them represent the learners of high proficiency and the other 40 represent the learners of low proficiency. 1200 target sentences are obtained from experiment 1 and experiment 2 respectively.Several findings have been obtained from the study after the SPSS analysis. First,learner’s proficiency level plays a certain role in cross-linguistic syntactic priming.Learners of low proficiency show strong cross-linguistic syntactic priming both in experiment 1 and experiment 2. Learners of high proficiency, however, show strongcross-linguistic syntactic priming only in experiment 1. Second, results from this study show that sentence structure has a significant effect on cross-linguistic syntactic priming. Learners are more likely to show strong cross-linguistic syntactic priming under the active condition than under the passive condition. Third, sentence structure seems to have a more significant influence on the effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming than learner’s proficiency level, and no interaction between them is found.The study results can be explained from the following aspects. First, participants in this study, except the high level students in experiment 2, show cross-linguistic syntactic priming effect. And this phenomenon could be illustrated by the bilingual syntactic representation model proposed by Hartsuiker et al.(2004). After the participant hear a Chinese priming sentence, the lexical node, feature node, category node, combinatorial node and other related nodes will be activated. The nodes and the connections between them do not disappear immediately, which gives obvious priority to the previous sentence structure during the subsequent production of the target sentence. Thus, cross-linguistic syntactic priming occurs. Second, the difference between Chinese and English in word order determines that the effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming will be relatively weak under passive condition.Third, the improvement of flexibility in sentence production and the change in language processing of learners of high proficiency determine that they display weaker cross-linguistic syntactic priming effect.The study results of this paper can at least cast some light on the way in which Chinese learner of English process syntactic information during L2 production and how different L2 proficiency levels and sentence structures influence them. This study can also enrich the cross-linguistic syntactic priming research in China.