The Syntactic Priming Of Double-object And Prepositional Dative Construction Acquisition

Double-object construction and dative construction are often used in our daily life.Previously scholars have done plenty of researches on the syntactic analysis and verb classification.However,there are few researches from the perspective of second language acquisition.Syntactic priming is often used to test the relations between these two constructions.Syntactic priming refers to the tendency that people will reuse the structure that have been heard or repeated previously.Many scholars have found that there is syntactic priming within-and between-languages,and the priming effect is stronger when verbs are the same.But there is no cross-linguistic syntactic priming if the word order is different.Yan Chunrong(2009)who conducted an experiment on College Students’ second language found that syntactic priming is related to the proficiency of learners’ second language learning level.Based on previous researches,this paper addresses two research questions.1.Is there a syntactic priming in the second language?2.For beginners,what is the priming effect of double-object and dative construction?This paper tries to answer these questions through experiments.The experiment was carried out in class A,class B and class C respectively through the modified sentence repetition,picture description and sentence completion of syntactic priming.The priming structure is double-object and prepositional dative construction in Class A;double-object construction(DOC)in Class B;prepositional dative construction(PDC)in Class C.The participants are at the second term in grade one.They are at the same age and same English level.Because the students are so young that they are not easy to acquire the second language,the author increased the times of priming,and used the same verbs to carry out the experiment.Through these experiments,we find that class B students have obvious syntactic priming,but class A and class C students do not have obvious syntactic priming.There are two major findings of this study.1.There is syntactic priming in the second language(English-English).2.For beginners,the syntactic priming effect of DOC is obvious,but the priming effect of PDC is less obvious.For the students who are not primed the structure,they may exploit the more familiar native meaning to the second language.So if participants forgot the priming structure,they may use the more familiar mother language structure from the corresponding Chinese structure.The Chinese structure of “give” is a double object structure so that the production of DOC accounts for the biggest proportion.