A Study On Sentence Production Of English Majors

To investigate the mental representation of sentence order of adverbial clause inEnglish learners of Chinese, two experiments are performed adopting oral picturedescription task, under the paradigm of structural priming across languages. We drawconclusions as follows: first, the influence of sentence order on priming is significantunder within English experimental conditions whereas not in the betweenChinese-English experiment. Second,“Partial integration”, as the bilingualrepresentation of Chinese English learners (CEL), characterizes the interim phaseranging from separateness to integration while CEL gradually acquire the order ofmain-subordinate clause, once developing into more proficient bilinguals. The presentstudy supports “one stage” account in that the sentence order impacts the sentenceproduction in both experiments. We can posit that the English mental representationof MS structure between the less and the more proficient is separate while shared forthe SM structure. In our experiments, lexical boost effect occurs for SM but not forMS structure, which seems to support one-locus account. Note that the production ofsentences adopts the mechanisms that coexist for the construction of phrases; weinterpret our experiments as an illustration of the residual activation account.