An Exploration Of Factors Affecting Cross-linguistic Structural Priming Of Passive Structure

Structural priming, an interesting phenomenon in language production, refers to theinclination to repeat recently encountered structures in subsequent communications or writing.This phenomenon was first observed in oral dialogues, and prudent researchers brought it intoexperimental study. Having a short history for less than30years though, plenty of progresshas been made under the endeavors of a variety of researchers. Main achievements includesome useful techniques to do research on structural priming, and possible mechanisms toaccount for the occurrence of structural priming. Currently, studies on structural priming havebeen extended from within-language to cross-linguistic ones.Based on previous achievements, this paper aims at exploring more about structuralpriming. Briefly speaking, the study is designed to answer the questions that what factors mayaffect the magnitude of cross-linguistic structural priming. By making clear of the question,this research is helpful to see the possible role of structural priming in second languagelearning, and it can enrich our understanding of psychological activities in second languageacquisition process. In order to reach these goals, the author takes passive structure, bothmarked and unmarked, as the example, and recruits80students from a college in Linfen tofinish a purposeful test. This test is actually modeled after the paradigm of sentencecompletion task which has been proved to be helpful in structural priming experiment. For the80participants, they are not chosen randomly, but are in close accordance with the factors.After analyzing the testing papers, it is confirmed that structural priming could occur between Chinese priming and English target. Processing the collected data by SPSS, the researcherfinds that of the three expected factors, two of them are considered to be effective. One is thatparticipants of different language proficiency levels perform differently in the test, and highproficiency participants show better and stronger priming effects than participants of lowlevel. The other effective factor lies in gender difference. As the result indicates, femalelearners produce more passive structure sentences than male learners. As to the third factor,the author negates subject direction, but accidentally discovers that verb variance might be animportant factor. Further explanations and analyses are developed later to illustrate the effectof these three factors. Results of this experiment do not support the view that structuralpriming is originated from the effect of preposition, and supports the activation accountproposed by Branigan and Pickering (1998).Following experimental results and discussions, the paper also makes some suggestionson second language teaching and learning. The role of repetition and imitation is supposed tobe reconsidered, and structural priming is advised to be brought into classroom activities sothat students could better master certain grammatical structures.Though the researcher does try to make this experiment and paper rigorous and precise,it inevitably bears some limitations. In terms of subjects, target structures, and several otherpromotion barriers, four limitations of this study are put forward, as well as correspondingsuggestions for further study.