The Comparison Of Within-and Between-language Structural Priming In Chinese English Learners And Its Implications To Bilingual Syntactic Representation

This study is devoted to exploring within-and between-language structural priming of Chinese English learners by employing structural priming experimental paradigm. It aimed to conducting an investigation and verification on the representation and model of syntactic information of Chinese English learners with a perspective of dynamic development. Two sets of comparison experiments of structural priming were designed to test Chinese English learners with different L2proficiency, comparison of English within-and English-Chinese between-language priming and comparison of Chinese within-and Chinese-English between-language priming respectively. The results showed English within-and English-Chinese between-language priming was the same only under the prepositional priming condition, which confirmed that the syntactic representation of Chinese English learners fitted with the developmental-syntax model. Meanwhile, L2proficiency under the different priming conditions exerted an influence on the magnitude of English within-and Chinese-English between-language structural priming in opposite directions, which went against the predication that cross-linguistic structural priming was independent of L2proficiency. Furthermore, similar to previous experimental findings on structural priming, this study also found the asymmetry existed in both within-and between-language syntactic priming, which opposed to the predication that cross-linguistic structural priming freed from language specificity.