A Study On The Effect Of Vitality In The Priming Of Active And Passive Sentence Structures For Intermediate And Advanced Chinese Learners

As an accepted means of studying linguistic representations,structure priming has been widely favoured by researchers.Most studies on structural priming have focused on syntactic representations,and less on conceptual representations.This paper investigates the effect of vitality in conceptual representations on second language output by examining the effect of vitality in structural priming,and thus illustrates the relationship between syntax and semantics in second language output.This study has important implications for both second language output and second language acquisition.Based on previous research findings and the close integration of syntax and semantics in Chinese,this paper takes the subject-passive structure as the entry point for studying the relationship between syntax and semantics,and conducts an experimental study on the effect of vitality on structure initiation in intermediate and advanced Chinese learners.The effect of vitality on the output of target sentences under the initiation of active-passive structure was taken as the main content of the experiment.The following conclusions were drawn: firstly,there is a vitality effect in both bilingual and cross-linguistic priming,and vitality can facilitate/inhibit the output of the target sentence under different priming conditions（active/passive）.Secondly,in linguistic output,vitality activates at the conceptualisation stage and influences syntactic representations from top-down,with effects on syntactic representations mainly in word order and the assignment of grammatical functions.Thirdly,the difference between intralingual and cross-linguistic initiation of bilingualism is due to the activation of Chinese level,episodic memory and lexical meta-nodes,and the formation of the difference is related to the formation of bilingual representations.The thesis is divided into six chapters: Chapter 1,Introduction,introduces the research background,research purpose,research significance,research innovations and future prospects of this paper.Chapter 2,the research review,introduces the model of language output,the relationship between structural priming and language output,the basic theoretical background such as vitality and the concerns of intra-and cross-linguistic priming in bilingualism,and the current status of research on the vitality effect in structural priming.Chapter 3,Experimental Design,describes the research hypothesis,the experimental subjects,the research materials,the research methods and the data selection criteria.Chapter 4,Experimental Study,explains the research questions as well as the operational procedures.Chapter 5 analyses the experimental results,analysing in turn whether there is a vitality effect,how vitality affects sentence output,whether there is a difference in sentence output when vitality is consistent/inconsistent,whether syntactic structure and vitality affect language output at the same time and the difference between cross-linguistic priming and intralingual priming in bilingual languages.Chapter 6 explains why vitalness affects language output from the perspective of second language output model,analyzes the reasons for the difference between intra-language priming and cross-language priming,and discusses the implications of this study for Chinese teaching.The last chapter summarizes the research of this paper,and also introduces the future research direction.