Syntactic Priming And Its Implications To Syntactic Representation Of Chinese English Learners

The thesis is a preliminary syntactic priming study on Chinese and English as a foreign language modeled on Bock's initial syntactic priming paradigm (1986). Both within- and across-languages syntactic priming experiments were designed to test on the Chinese English learners with different L2 proficiency. The findings drawn from our experiments revealed that syntactic priming reflects the implicit knowledge of language per se rather than specific to a particular language. We found that generally speaking learners with higher level of L2 expertise exhibited greater priming effects. We argued that subjects with higher L2 proficiency would develop second language autonomy resulting in more efficient access to L2 syntactic representation than novice learners and thus yield comparable syntactic priming effects to the L1 learners. Similar to the findings of previous researches on cross-language lexical and translational experiments, we also found the asymmetric priming effects observed in cross-language priming tasks.