Syntactic Priming Effect On Speech Production By EFL University Learners

Syntactic priming refers to people's tendency of reusing the same syntactic structure or type they have just received or produced during their language production. This concept argues that a particular form of syntactic structure in language comprehension or production processed in preceding language contexts will have an impact on the following language pattern. Because such effects rely upon the language processor recognizing a syntactic relationship between two utterances, they offer a versatile behavioral tool for investigating how syntactic structure is represented by the human's cognitive system. Since Bock's initial study in this field in 1986, syntactic priming has drawn more and more attention in cognitive science and has become an important research topic abroad in the study of syntactic representation and mechanism of language processing from the perspective of psycholinguistics. Researchers have designed various experimental paradigms on syntactic priming experiments, including Bock's picture description paradigm, Potter and Lombardi's immediate recall paradigm, and Pickering and Branigan's written sentence completion paradigm, all of which provide the scientific evidence to tap into the process of human being's syntactic representation and mechanism underlying language production. In these studies, the researchers also provide several theoretical models and give the detailed explanations on the process of syntactic representation and language production from different aspects. They insist that syntactic priming effect decreases the speaker's syntactic processing load and simplifies the syntactic structure organization when they manage to integrate kinds of semantic, pragmatic and phonological information before expressing themselves fluently. However, at present most of the studies abroad are based on the cognitive process of native language. In our country, the study of foreign language production is very limited due to the lack of the computer software for large-scale collection of latency data.The present thesis is an experimental report of priming effect on speech production by EFL university learners. Modeling the picture description paradigm on Bock's, the author designs the priming sentences and target pictures for the test according to the university English teaching curriculum of our country. The present study aims at exploring the inherent mechanism of syntactic representation when English speeches are produced as a foreign language by Chinese university learners. The experiment employs the computer software for large-scale collection of latency data developed through the coordination of College of Foreign Studies and College of Computer Engineering in Guangxi Normal University in a provincial research project led by Prof. Zhang Shaolin in 2008. The software is used to collect the latency dada and record the response time between the appearance of a picture on the computer screen and the onset of language production of each subject. The research questions that the author tries to find the answers to are as follows: (1) Does the syntactic priming effect exist among university English learners in our country? (2) Is syntactic priming effect related to the learners'English proficiency? (3) What is syntactic priming effect like when the meaning of a sentence is shown in different priming patterns? (4) Is the priming effect related to the length of response time of the Chinese learners of English? The participants of the research are selected through a random cluster sampling method from second-year undergraduate English majors and first-year postgraduate English majors in Guangxi Normal University. In order to delve into the information that is concealed in the collected data and generalize the findings from the sample to the population from which the sample is selected, SPSS 11.5 is utilized to analyze 60 groups of valid data with descriptive and inferential methods such as t-test and Pearson correlation analysis.Based on statistical analyses and comparisons with the previous researches of the same kind and SLA theories, the major findings of the present study are concluded as follows. Firstly, there exists a strong syntactic priming effect across both the intermediate level of L2 proficiency and advanced level of L2 proficiency, which means that foreign language learners employ same syntactic structures used in immediate previous language context. Secondly, the syntactic priming effect is related to the proficiency of the subjects. The subjects with advanced level of L2 proficiency show stronger syntactic priming effect than those of intermediate level of L2 proficiency. Thirdly, when the meaning of a sentence is shown in different dative and transitive priming types, the subjects demonstrate a general tendency towards the usage of prepositional structure and active structure instead of the double-object structure and passive structure. And fourthly, the latency data illustrate that there is a positive correlation among the length of response time of four priming conditions.The whole paper falls into six parts. Chapter One serves as a general introduction, including the purpose of this research and questions to be answered. Chapter Two is the literature review in which some relevant and significant researches done by researchers in China and abroad are briefly summarized. Chapter Three covers the theories that underpin the present research. Chapter Four describes the design of this experimental research, including the method, objectives, subjects, variables, the instruments for data collection and the procedures of the research. Chapter Five and Chapter Six are devoted to the statistical findings and the analysis of the experimental results. Chapter Seven involves a brief conclusion, the implication and the limitation of this study.