The Role Of Event Structure In Second Language Production:Evidence From Structural Priming In Chinese ESL Learners’ Motion Event Description

Language production contains three stages: 1)the Conceptualization stage,also called Message Planning stage;2)the Linguistic Formulation stage;and 3)the Articulation stage.Previous studies demonstrated influences of syntactic structure on the selection of conceptual information and later on the selection of syntactic structure.A few recent studies found that abstract event structure also affects speakers’ choice of information components and syntactic structure.But these studies all centered around first language production,leaving questions about the role of event structure on second language production.While studies on second language production focused on event conceptualization and conceptual transfer between L1 and L2,without touching upon the mapping pattern from conceptual structure to syntactic structure.Therefore,this study,under the structural priming paradigm,is going to investigate whether and how abstract event structure will be activated at the Message Planning stage of second language production,how will the activated event structure affect speakers’ selection of conceptual information and syntactic structure,as well as explore the mapping pattern from conceptual information to syntactic structure.Four research questions are put forward: 1)Is the abstract event structure activated at the Message Planning level of language production? If yes,does it influence Chinese ESL learners’ selection of information components(manner and path)? 2)Does the activated abstract event structure have any implications for Chinese ESL learners’ distribution of information components(manner and path)at the interface level of language production? If yes,what are the implications? 3)Does the activated abstract event structure have any implications for Chinese ESL learners’ package of syntactic structure at the Linguistic Formulation level of language production? If yes,what are the implications? 4)Are the above mentioned processes in Chinese ESL learners’ motion event descriptions the same with English native speakers?To solve these research questions one experiment under the structural priming paradigm is designed.Chinese ESL learners and English native speakers are required to give descriptions about the motion events displayed in short cartoons videos.Three types of priming sentences are presented before the videos.Type 1 primes share conceptual and lexical overlap with the targets;Type 2 primes only share conceptual overlap with the targets;Type 3 primes share no conceptual overlap with the targets.The experiment showed such results:(1)Chinese participants only in Type 1 condition increased path mention;English participants in both Type 1 and Type 2 conditions increased path mention.(2)Chinese participants in Type 1 condition increased path verb use,while participants in both Type 1 and Type 2 conditions increased produce of manner-in-subject;English participants in Type 1 condition increased path verb use and produce of manner-in-subject.(3)Chinese participants in both Type 1 and Type 2 conditions produced more complex NP frame while only in Type 1 condition did participants increased use of primed VP frame(V_NP or V_PP).While English participants only in Type 1 condition produced more complex NP frame and primed VP frame(V_NP or V_PP).The above findings suggest that: 1)At the Message Planning stage,abstract event structure is activated by bottom-up lexical priming and top-down conceptual priming in first language production,while it is activated by bottom-up lexical priming in second language production.It indicates that the conceptual representation of motion events for L2 learners is different from that for native speakers.Chinese ESL learners are not as sensitive to the abstract event structure represented by English primes as native speakers,so they rely on lexical information to activate the abstract event structure;2)In terms of mapping conceptual information to syntactic structure,it was lexical information that guided native speakers to distribute manner in dis-preferred subject position and build complex subject NP frame;while it was conceptual structure that guided second language learners to produce such dis-preferred structure.Because native speakers have rooted in the way their first language grammatically encoding information components while second language learners haven’t,it was more difficult for native speakers than for second language learners to be primed to encode information components in a dis-preferred position.