| During language processing, people tend to stick to the syntactic structure that they are previously exposed to. This phenomenon is called structural priming. According to the view which relates structural priming to learning, structural priming is regarded as an important cognitive mechanism for language development. Kim McDonough (2006) was among the first to conduct structural priming experiments in second language (L2) interactive situation. Inspired by his research, the present study aims to investigate structural priming among a group of Chinese learners of English in order to shed some light on L2 development. Different from McDonough's research, the current study was conducted among a group of foreign language learners who have the same first language (L1) background and at the same English proficiency level. It also made some efforts to identify the influencing factors on structural priming.The study was composed of four structural priming experiments using the confederate-scripting technique in which the researcher and the participant took turn carrying out a picture description and matching activity. The priming structures were the dative alternation, i.e. the double object dative structure (DOD) and the prepositional dative structure (PD). So the four experiments were the PD Priming experiment, the DOD Priming experiment, the Same Verb DOD Priming experiment and the baseline experiment. The prime and the target words used in the study were from 3 dative verb classes, they were the Give Verbs, the Creation Verbs, and the Verbs of Transfer of a Message. Apart from the real verbs, two nonce verbs were introduced into each experiment. The major findings are: (1) The experiments successfully elicited significant priming effect with DOD structure but not with PD structure. This finding is consistent with the inverse-preference pattern, which maintains that the more preferred or more common structure exhibits less structural priming effect. (2) When the prime and the target verbs were identical, the priming effect tended to be stronger. (3) Statistical analysis based on verb classes found that the structural priming with the most biased word class (With these words, people show the strongest tendency of using one structure in the alternatives and ignore the other.) elicited the weakest priming effect. (4) The structural priming with nonce verbs brought about stronger priming effect as compared with real verbs.The results indicate that structural priming is less likely to happen in foreign language context than in native language context, for its effect is influenced by various factors such as L2 speakers' preference of certain structure. Secondly, it was found that lexical boost can to a large extent enhance the effect of priming, but due to its transient nature, this effect will not have far-reaching influence on language development. Moreover, as far as the implicit-learning function of structural priming is concerned, the stronger priming effect with nonce verbs than with real verbs gives people insight into some important aspects of second language acquisition (SLA) such as L2 fossilization.The study is constructive in terms of its effort to identify the possible influencing factors of structural priming and thus deepens one's understanding of structural priming in L2 production. Besides, with the findings in this study, some crucial topics in SLA such as L1 transfer and L2 fossilization can be viewed from the angle of structural priming.
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