Cross-linguistic Syntactic Priming In English And Chinese Bilinguals

Syntactic representation and process in language production is a concerned issue among language psychologists.As an important tool to explore the mechanism of syntactic representations,syntactic priming has been used in many researches.Syntactic priming refers to that in language production and comprehension,people prefer repeating the same or similar syntactic structure used before.For example,in a conversation if one uses the passive structure,the other will use the same structure in the following conversation.Many researches have shown that the syntactic priming effect exists in different languages,different syntactic structures and different groups.(Hartsuiker&Kolk,1998;Ferreira,2003;Scheepers,2003;Brooks&Tomasello,1999)What's more,besides the monolingual language production and comprehension,researchers also find the effect in the bilingual language production and comprehension.Using the confederate-scripting technique,the present study made research on the cross-linguistic syntactic priming of English-Chinese bilinguals.The participants are 35 foreign students from Beijing Foreign Studies University and Beijing University,including 19 boys and 16 girls.They are from America,England and Australia,whose first language is English.Their average age is 22 years old.According to the time they have spent in Chinese learning,they are divided into primary level and intermediate level.There are 21 participants of primary level who have studied Chinese for half to one year and 14 participants of intermediate level who have studied Chinese for more than one year.The materials are subject-predicate sentences(e.g.The boy eats a banana.)and double-object sentences(e.g.The teacher teaches us Chinese.).The two kinds of sentences are with same structure and word-order in Chinese and English.In addition,they are also the most common syntactic structure in both Chinese and English.There are 32 priming sentences presented in English,and 32 target sentences answered in Chinese.The present study has two experiments.Experiment 1 aims to inspect whether the English-Chinese cross-linguistic syntactic priming effect exists and whether the effect differs in foreign students with different foreign language levels.The experimental design is 2(language levels)*2(syntactic structure).the participants are divided into primary and intermediate stages.And the syntactic structures include subject-predicate sentences and double-object sentences.E.g.first presented the priming sentence "The boy eats a banana",then the target sentence should be said is"?????".The results showed as follows:first,when the prime sentence is subject-predicate sentences in English,the proportion of subject-predicate sentences in Chinese produced by the participants is 73%,which is significantly higher than that of double-object sentences of 34%.Similarly,when the prime sentence is double-object sentences in English,the proportion of double-object sentences in Chinese produced by the participants is 46%,which is significantly higher than that of subject-predicate sentences of 13%.This showed that the the prime stimulus of English priming sentences did promote the production of corresponding target sentences in Chinese,which means that the English-Chinese cross linguistic syntactic priming exists.Secondly,in the stimulus of English subject-predicate and double-object priming sentences,the foreign students in primary level of Chinese produced Chinese subject-predicate sentences and double-object priming sentences in the proportion of 51%and 35%,while the participants in intermediate level of Chinese produced the sentences in the proportions of 21%and 11%.It shows that the lower the Chinese level of foreign students is,the larger the cross-linguistic syntactic priming is,which means that the L2 proficiency has an impact on the cross-linguistic syntactic priming.The lower the L2 level is,the larger the syntactic priming is.The second experiment aims to see whether the verb repetition would strengthen the cross-linguistic syntactic priming with the mixed design of 2(L2 proficiency)*2(syntactic structure)*2(verb repetition).The L2 level and the syntactic structures are the same as that in the first experiment.The verb repetitions are divided into two conditions.One is that the verb in the prime sentences and the target sentences are the same such as the prime sentence is "The boy eats a banana",while the target sentence is "?????".The other is the same as that in the first experiment.The procedure of this experiment is also the same as that in the first experiment.The result shows that when the verbs are the same in the prime sentences and the target sentences,the participants produce 80%subject-predicate sentences under the subject-predicate priming sentences,which is 7%higher than that in the double-object condition.It shows that verb repetition has an impact on the effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming.When the verbs are the same in prime sentences and the target sentences,the effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming can be strengthened.In conclusion,the results of the present study are as follows:first,there is effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming between English and Chinese,which shows that the mechanisms of syntactic priming of these two languages are shared.It is consistent with the effect found in the Indo-European languages in the preview researches,which means that it is common that the mechanism of cross-linguistic syntactic representation in bilinguals is shared between two languages.Secondly,the mechanism of cross-linguistic syntactic representation differs when bilinguals are in different L2 levels.When the L2 is in low level,the syntactic representation of L1 is in advantage.Thirdly,the verb repetition in prime sentences and the target sentences will strengthen the effect of cross-linguistic syntactic priming.These findings in this study will help the researchers better understand the differences of syntactic representations of L1 and L2 of bilinguals in different L2 levels and know more about the cross-linguistic syntactic representation.It can add some evidences of Chinese language to the researches of cross-linguistic syntactic representation.This could help build a more reasonable and common model of cross-linguistic syntactic representation and also help the teachers do L2 teaching more specifically according to the students' cognitive rules.