An Empirical Study Of Cross-linguistic Syntactic Priming On Passive Structure Among High School Students

In the recent years,the cognitive system of sentence production has become a hot topic in the researches.A great number of researchers have discovered that people tend to make use of the syntactic structure that has been heard,seen or processed before when they are producing a sentence,which is called the phenomenon of syntactic priming.Scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of researches on cross-linguistic and intra-lingual syntactic priming by adopting different research paradigms and participants and they have achieved a lot of successes,which can help us better understand how the abstract language processes.However,few empirical research discoveries have been properly used to the teaching of high school students.So this research investigated the cross-linguistic syntactic priming of Chinese and English passive structures among high school English learners.The subjects have different second language proficiencies in high school.The author used written-picture-description paradigm in this research and a questionnaire is delivered to survey the cross-linguistic syntactic priming effect among the different levels of students.And its data was put into social scientific statistics software,SPSS 21.0.Through the data analysis of Two-Way ANOVA,One-Way ANOVA and Multiple Regression Model,the research discoveries are as follows:1.With the improvement of second language level,the sensitivity of high school English learners on cross-linguistic syntactic priming of Chinese and English passive structures is increasingly intensified.There exists significant interaction between different second language levels and three Chinese priming sentences.There also exists cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects of Chinese and English passive structures among low-level,mid-level and high-level high school English learners.The priming effect that high-level high school English learners applied Chinese marked passive sentences to priming English target passive sentences is the most significant.2.Among high school English learners,both Chinese marked passive priming sentences and unmarked passive priming sentences can equally activate English target passive sentences.It indicates that word-order similarity is not a necessary condition for the occurrence ofcross-linguistic syntactic priming,supporting the view of the Two-Stage Model of Language Production.3.The subjects' different second language levels and genders,and three Chinese priming sentence patterns can well explain the phenomenon of cross-linguistic syntactic priming on Chinese and English passive structures.There is significantly positive correlation among grade(second language level),Chinese priming sentence patterns,and priming scores,so they are the useful prediction variables.While,there is insignificantly negative correlation between gender and priming scores.And gender is not a useful prediction variable.Therefore,the teachers ought to know the students' English levels so that they could teach them English passive structures in different ways.Secondly,the teachers should use more English passive sentences to communicate with students in order to cultivate and improve the students' awareness of English passives.Finally,the teachers ought to teach the students how to distinguish the similarities and differences between Chinese and English passive structures and make full use of the positive transfer of the first language in order to assist the teaching of English passive structure.