An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Thematic Order Upon The Syntactic Priming In English Learners

In recent years,the cognitive system of sentence production has been a focus of more and more researchers.Many researches have shown that people prefer to use the syntactic structure that has been processed just now when they are producing a sentence,and that is the phenomenon of syntactic priming.The study of this kind can help us understand the abstract language processing better.The paper choose 35 students in grade one and 35 students in grade three of Zhangzhou No.1 High School as the research sample,adopting the sentence recall paradigm,making use of the statistical tools named SPSS 21.0 and analyzing the syntactic priming effect of thematic order upon different level subjects.The results show that the thematic order exerts an effect on the English learners' syntactic priming regardless of their L2 level.And with the improvement of the L2 level,the amount of syntactic priming is getting larger.The result shows no difference and great difference between the different level subjects when the thematic order of the target sentence and priming sentence is the same and vice versa,as is the amount of the syntactic priming of high level subjects is larger than that of low level ones.Besides,the present paper shows both similarity and difference with that of researches in literature on the cross-language syntactic priming,which will be illustrated in detail in the paper.In the meantime,the paper relates the research on the influence of thematic order upon cross-language syntactic priming with the English teaching in senior high school and analyzes it with Two-Way ANOVA as well as Simple Effect analysis,which is a major attribution to the researches in the literature.In addition,the research gives some suggestions to English-teaching in middle school.Firstly,the teachers ought to pay attention to the cultivation of the language awareness.Secondly,since the higher the L2 level is,the greater the influence of the syntactic priming to the students is,the teachers should teach in different ways when facing the students in different levels in their daily English teaching in the view of syntactic priming.What's more,it is better for the teachers to teach in various ways according to the different thematic orderbetween Chinese and English.Last but not least,the teachers should pay attention to the influence of the priming sentences and ought to speak English to students whenever possible since whether the students' L2 level is high or low,thematic order has an impact on the syntactic priming in this study.