The Efficacy Of Structural Priming On The Acquisition Of Double Object Construction By Chinese EFL Learners

This thesis aims at investigating the role of structural priming in Chinese EFLlearners’ acquisition of double object (DO) construction. Specifically, it addresses twoquestions:(i) whether structural priming can facilitate the acquisition of DOconstruction in the short term and long term, and (ii) whether recency effect willmediate the efficacy of structural priming on facilitating DO construction acquisition.To answer these two questions, an empirical study was conducted.The study adopted a pretest-treatment–posttest–delayed posttest design toexplore the relationship between structural priming and second language (L2) learning.60elementary level Chinese EFL learners from a vocational college in Guangzhouparticipated in the study. They were randomly and equally assigned to three groups:control group, no-filler priming group and long-filler priming group. The experimentlasted two weeks. In the first week, each group first finished a picture description task(pretest), and then two experimental groups got no-filler priming and long-fillerpriming treatment respectively (To examine the mediating effect of recency, recencywas operationalized by manipulating the fillers between the prime and the targetresponse.) while the control group got no priming treatment. After the treatmentsession, each group completed an immediate picture description task (immediateposttest) on the same day. A week later, a delayed picture description test (delayedposttest) was administered. It is shown that DO construction production by the controlgroup remained almost the same in three testing sessions while two experimentalgroups’ target structure production increased rapidly in the posttests, although therewas a slight decrease from the immediate posttest to the delayed posttest. The currentresults suggest that structural priming can facilitate the acquisition of DO constructionboth in the short term and long term.Target structure productions of two experimental groups in the immediateposttests and delayed posttests were independently compared. Statistically significantdifference was detected in the immediate posttest, but not in the delayed posttest. The results indicate that recency effect attenuated the facilitatory effects of structuralpriming on DO construction acquisition in the short term, but the effect is limited inthe long term.Four factors namely repetition, frequency of use, interaction and contextinvolved in priming treatment contribute to strengthening the abstract representationof DO construction and thus facilitate the acquisition. The processing load needed toretrieve the syntactic information of target structure in the prime sentences results inthe mediating effects of recency. The present study confirmed the potentiallybeneficial role of structural priming in L2DO construction learning. It also indicatesthat the efficacy of structural priming on L2learning can be maximized withoutintervening items between the prime and the target.