The Representation Of Lexical And Syntactic Information And Its Development In Bilinguals

Through cross-linguistic syntactic priming experimental paradigm, this study was devoted to examining the influence of L2 levels and verb types upon L1-L2 cross-linguistic syntactic priming concerning Chinese English learners to explore the representation of lexical and syntactic information and its development in bilinguals. As the experimental results turned out, L1-L2 cross-linguistic syntactic priming effect increases with the improvement of L2 proficiency. We argued that the link between L2 lemma node and the combinatorial node will be strengthened with further learning. Meanwhile, it was found that translation-equivalent verbs produce additional L1-L2 cross-linguistic syntactic priming whereas unrelated verbs do not and they produce larger additional priming effect on high-level L2 proficiency than on low-level L2 proficiency. Furthermore, we found that due to learning process and syntactic input, the representation of some syntactic structures will early become mature and stable.