An Experimental Study Of Cross-language Syntactic Priming In Language Comprehension

Priming is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus influences the response to another stimulus (Meyer and Schvaneveldt,1971). As a specific form of priming, syntactic priming refers to the tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its syntactic similarity to previously experienced sentences (or "primes"). Since the classic experimental presentation by Bock (1986), syntactic priming has received increasing attention from researchers. Not only syntactic priming itself has undergone heavy investigation, its potential of being a promising method to dig deeper into certain language processing mechanisms has been increasingly recognized by researchers. In particular, priming researchers argued that syntactic priming might provide evidence for the mental representation of linguistic knowledge (Pickering and Ferreira,2008). The evidence of syntactic priming in bilinguals might tap into how they represent the syntactic knowledge of their first language (LI) and second language (L2) in their mind. However, most syntactic priming studies mainly focused on priming in language production while literature on priming in comprehension is limited, especially in cross-language research. Previous cross-language syntactic priming studies mainly focused on languages that were mostly typologically related (e.g. English and German, English and Spanish). Cross-language studies of syntactic priming on typologically and genetically unrelated languages, such as Chinese and English, might produce different results.The paper reports an experimental study to test English-Chinese syntactic priming in language comprehension. It was found that cross-language syntactic priming occurred between Chinese and English in language comprehension. Specifically, while comprehending the Chinese target statements, participants tended to react faster and record higher accuracy when the Chinese target statements shared identical syntactic structure with the English priming sentences; participants tended to exhibit slower reaction and lower accuracy when the Chinese target statements’syntactic structure differed from the English priming sentences. The author interpreted the cross-language syntactic priming in language comprehension demonstrated in the study based on the implicit-learning theory and the lemma-nodes-based model.