Syntactic Priming In Chinese EFL Learners’ Production Of English Dative Constructions

During everyday language production, speakers tend to repeat certain previouslyencountered sounds, words and syntactic structures. The tendency for speakers torepeat a particular syntactic structure heard or spoken in prior utterances is calledsyntactic priming, also referred to as structural priming or syntactic persistence. Theoccurrence of syntactic priming indicates the existence of abstract syntacticrepresentations for a certain syntactic structure.The existence of syntactic priming was originally established in Bock’s (1986)classical experiments with adults. Since then, researchers along this line have pointedout that syntactic priming occurs within language and across languages. Moreover, itcan occur with a range of syntactic structures such as dative constructions andactive-passive alternations. English dative constructions, which describe transferevents, take the form of either a double object structure or a prepositional objectstructure. This paper attempts to investigate syntactic priming in Chinese high-andlow-level EFL learners’ production of English dative constructions using theconfederate scripting technique. To explore the occurrence of syntactic priming, threeexperiments were carried out. Ninety-six participants from two different schools tookpart in the present study. Also examined in this study was the influence of Englishlanguage proficiency on the occurrence of syntactic priming. Therefore, theparticipants were divided into two groups on the basis of their language proficiencylevel (high vs. low) which was determined by their scores on the Oxford QuickPlacement Test (2001).The three experiments conducted in the current study were No Prime (NoP)Experiment, Double Object Prime (DOP) Experiment and Prepositional Object Prime(POP) Experiment respectively. The inclusion of the No Prime Experiment in thepresent study was to measure the original frequency of the target structures in theabsence of syntactic priming and to detect more precisely the nature of the differencesbetween the priming experiments. The NoP experiment shows that participants, irrespective of their English language proficiency, almost always producedprepositional object sentences with dative verbs, demonstrating overwhelmingpreferences for PO structure over DO structure. The POP and DOP experiments foundthat syntactic priming did not occur with prepositional object structure but withdouble-object structure, despite a large proportion of prepositional object utterances inthe No Prime Experiment. Besides, data analyses demonstrated that languageproficiency level did not affect the occurrence of syntactic priming. Althoughlanguage proficiency effect was not statistically significant, the interaction of primetype by proficiency level for DO targets showed that high-level participants exhibiteda greater sensitivity to DO primes than low-level participants. As a result, it wasreasonable to conclude that high-level participants were more susceptible to syntacticpriming than low-level participants in the production of DO targets.On one hand, the occurrence of syntactic priming in Chinese EFL learners’production of double object structure suggests the existence of the abstract syntacticrepresentation for this structure. On the other hand, syntactic priming is found tofacilitate the use of an otherwise dispreferred and unlikely-to-be-produced syntacticstructure in L2learners, due to preferences for an alternative syntactic form. Theabsence of syntactic priming for prepositional object structure is possibly due to thefact that the number of PO target production has reached a ceiling effect in the NoPrime Experiment. Hence, repeated exposure fails to prime this structure. Anotherpossibility is that syntactic priming does occur with PO structure, but the effect is toosmall to reach any statistical significance. To conclude, the major findings in thecurrent study reveal that syntactic priming is robust and reliable enough to helpactivate syntactic structures which are less preferred and infrequently produced by L2learners, suggesting a potentially beneficial role of syntactic priming in L2Englishlearning. In addition, the findings of the present study have pedagogical implicationsfor L2English teaching.