| Since Bock’s initial experiment in 1986, syntactic priming has drawn attention of both linguists and psychologists and has been a significant field in the study of syntactic representation and mechanism of language production from the perspective of psycholinguistics. In 1974. Baddeley and Hitch proposed the concept of working memory. They referred to working memory as a memory system of limited capacity used for keeping information and simultaneous cognitive processing of information including comprehension, learning and reasoning. Working memory also plays a basic role in syntactic priming which is an implicit cognitive processing. Meanwhile, language cognitive processing has a close correlation with language proficiency (Traxler,2012). Thus, the study is designed to explore the effects of working memory capacity and second language proficiency on cross-linguistic structural priming. Specifically, it attempts to answer the following research questions: 1. Does syntactic priming exist across English and Chinese among English learners? 2. How does language proficiency affect cross-linguistic structural priming effect? 3. What is the correlation between working memory capacity and cross-linguistic priming effect?Sixty participants from Yangzhou University majoring in English are invited to take part in this experiment. The experimental subjects in this thesis are divided into two groups (thirty students of each group). They are required to take a syntactic priming test and working memory capacity test. The first test is WM span test in which the subjects were required to recall the final word of each sentence and meanwhile judge the meaningfulness of each sentence. They were divided into high and low span groups according to their working memory span. After that, they were asked to take syntactic priming test. Every priming sentence is attached with two translation sentences functioned as target sentences. If participants choose the sentence whose structure is consistent with priming sentence, it is viewed as the existence of syntactic priming. This study is carried out by applying both a quantitative method and a qualitative method. This thesis adopts the independent samples t-test and correlation analysis to analyze the effects of working memory capacity and the different language levels on students’ priming results. The subjects’working memory capacity scores and their performance in syntactic priming test are submitted to SPSS 16.0 for analysis. The major findings are as follows:Firstly, there exists syntactic priming across English and Chinese. And the priming effect from L1 to L2 is stronger than that from L2 to L1 which was in line with previous study.Secondly, the results show that second language proficiency exerts a great influence on structure priming from L1 to L2. Participants with higher second proficiency exhibits the weaker priming effect, which is affected by native language’s structure. The conclusion of this study is consistent with the findings of Li Rongbao (2006). On the contrary, if participants’second language proficiency is low, the priming effect will be stronger (Xu Hao & Gao Caifeng,2008). However, in the process of syntactic priming from L2 to LI, regardless of language proficiency, participants of two groups represent almost the same magnitude of structure priming.Lastly, working memory capacity significantly correlates with structure priming from L1 to L2. It has no correlation with structure priming from L2 to L1. Specifically, in the process of priming from LI to L2, if participants’second language proficiency is high, the working memory span of second language is large, the syntactic priming effect is less obvious. For the priming from LI to L2, the stronger structural priming effect was only found among the beginning second language learners. The role that working memory plays in structural priming is related to second language proficiency. |
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