Syntatctic Priming In Speech Production In Chinese Learners Of English

This paper presents a picture description experiment which shows the syntactic priming effects in Chinese learners of English. The experiment is modeled after priming studies with L 2 English learners of Spanish involving transitive and dative constructions. Syntactic priming refers to the tendency of producing a sentence of a particular form as a result of recent prior experience with that form. In the study subjects were presented with a picture that was described by a confederate of the experiment. The subject's task was to match descriptions from the confederate to the picture shown and to say whether or not the two corresponded. If the picture and the description were mismatched, the subjects must describe the picture using the word written below the objects. The sentence produced by the confederate is the prime which employed the transitive (passive voice / active voice) or dative (double object / prepositional object) constructions. There is no semantic relationship between the priming sentence and the target picture. The purpose of the experiment is to explore whether there exists the syntactic priming effect in English speech production in Chinese learners. This effect suggests the existence of abstract mental representation for particular syntactic constructions, independent of...