| Structural priming (or syntactic priming) is a speaker's tendency to repeat structural patterns (Bock, 1986). Employing structural priming, three experiments were conducted with adult Korean-English unbalanced bilinguals (i.e., L2 English learners). Two broad goals of this dissertation were to investigate how the bilingual mind is cognitively integrated by exploiting structural priming across languages, and to show that structural priming has important, beneficial cognitive functions in second language (L2) learning.;To attain the first goal, Experiments 1 and 2 addressed three specific research questions: (a) whether bilingual syntactic processing is shared; (b) if so, at which level it is shared and integrated, i.e., at the functional level vs. positional level in Bock and Levelt's (1994) production model; and (c) whether it can be different depending on language proficiency. Experiment 1 observed structural priming from L1 Korean to L2 English in the English prepositional-object and Korean postpositional-object structures. The results demonstrated that bilingual syntactic processing is shared between similar structures across languages irrespective of surface argument order, providing evidence that it is integrated at the functional level. Also, the results revealed that structural priming occurred in high-proficiency bilingual production, not in low-proficiency L2 learners, indicating that bilingual syntactic processing becomes integrated as proficiency increases. Experiment 2 observed no structural priming from L2 English to L1 Korean, but a partial priming effect in only high-proficiency speakers' production of the English Prepositional-Object dative and Korean Scrambled Postpositional-Object dative sentences. This might be evidence for the development of shared bilingual processing and asymmetric bilingual processing.;Experiment 3 addressed two research questions with respect to the second goal of this dissertation that asked (a) whether structural priming within English as a form of implicit learning can help L2 learners build L2 syntactic knowledge and improve L2 production and (b) whether structural priming combined with explicit knowledge is more effective than structural priming alone. The results demonstrated overall improvement of performance on grammaticality judgment and picture description production tests after structural priming training, in comparison to baseline performance on the pretests, showing that structural priming thus helped second language learners learn L2 syntactic knowledge and improve L2 production. The results also revealed that the explicit learning condition can be more benficial for training and short-term learning than the implicit condition with respect to speeding up learning, though implicit learning can catch up with explicit learning in the long run. Thus, structural priming combined with explicit knowledge leads learners to perform better in production than structural priming alone.;The overall results in this study are discussed in terms of its methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical significance, yielding substantial implications for research on bilingualism in cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and second language acquisition. |
