Lexical Boost Effect Of Syntactic Priming In L2 Comprehension

Syntactic priming refers to the phenomenon that previous experiencing of one sentence can facilitate the processing of a following structural matching sentence.Prior L1 studies have manifested that syntactic priming in production is observable without lexical overlap between the prime sentence and the target sentence,and the effect can be boosted when there exists lexical overlap.However,syntactic priming in L1 comprehension is usually unobserved without such lexical boost.Syntactic priming is seldom discussed in L2 comprehension.The present research probes into the lexical boost effect of syntactic priming in L2 comprehension to investigate the lexical nature of syntactic processing in L2 comprehension.Future we would like to provide some illuminations in resolving some of the controveries in L1 studies.It is supposed that the asymmetry between production and comprehension probably lies in their processing depth,rather than the fundamental processing mechanism.Information in comprehension is usually cursorily processed,which causes syntactic priming too weak to be detected.Therefore in our experiment we adopted Tooley & Bock's(2014)mixed-modality(i.e.,reading & speaking)design to improve the processing in comprehension.In a series of sentence-recalling tasks,the trial sentences(the prime sentences and the target sentences)tested in reading were mixed pseudo-randomly with the filler sentences tested in speaking.The L2 participants were not preliminarily informed in which modality the sentences were tested.Hence the participants would spare no effort to memorize the sentence in either modality.The sentences were processed as deeply in comprehension as they were in production.The particpants that took part in our experiment were 72 English L2 learners who spoke Chinese as their L1.In the experiment,the prime sentences and the target sentences were manipulated to have either same or different syntactic structures,to contain verb overlap or not.The reaction time of the participants reading the target sentences was recorded.The experiment was programmed and controlled by E-Prime 2.0,with the sentences presented on a 14.1? computer screen.The collected data were analysed in Two-Way ANOVA.The results show that the target sentences were read faster following a prime sentence that contained the same structure when the prime sentence and the target sentence had no verb overlap.However,the lexical boost effect was not observed and the priming effect was completely absent when there's verb reused across the prime sentence and the target sentence.This means lexically independent syntactic priming exists in L2 comprehension but the effect is blocked by the verb overlap between prime and target sentences.This is inconsistent with L1 observations.Neither the residual activation account nor the implicit learning account is well-suited to accommodate such phenomenon.From a modular perspective of cognitive processing,we argue that syntactic priming is in essence the rising of the activation level of representations in syntactic module.The syntactic module is linked to the phonological module and the conceptual module by virtue of interfaces.Therefore we can observe lexically boosted syntactic priming in L1 due to the additional activation by phonological and conceptual information through the interfaces.By contrast,L2 acquisition at the interfaces is commonly defective.L2 syntactic and phonological/conceptual representations are processed separately,rather than as a single set of coherent representations.Thus when prime and target sentences involve both syntactic and lexical overlaps,the cognitive resources would be biased to the more conspicuous phonological and conceptual repetitions,leaving the tacit syntactic information poorly processed.