Grammatical Encoding Of Concepts In L2 Production

Language production involves three stages of processing,the stage of conceptualizing,seen as a generator of preverbal message which includes all the conceptual information of what speakers want to include,the stage of formulating that consists of grammatical encoding and phonological encoding and the stage of articulating the final sentence.Among them,grammatical encoding consists of functional processing which involves functional assignment and positional processing which involves the creation of ordered words.Most of the previous studies in L1 production examined how the process of grammatical encoding is,i.e.whether functional processing and positional processing are in serial or in parallel,which remains a controversial issue.Moreover,this concerning issue seemingly has rarely been touched in empirical studies in L2 production.Then,the present study touched upon this issue and put forward the following research questions.Two research questions are posed: 1)How do L2 learners process grammatical encoding in sentence production? Specifically,is L2 grammatical encoding processed in serial or in parallel for English native speakers who take Chinese as L2? 2)Is English Chinese learners’ grammatical encoding of concepts in sentence production different from Chinese native speakers? If the answer is yes,what are the differences?Subsequently,two structural priming experiments are conducted to answer the research questions.In Experiment 1,participants described pictures depicting a dative event in Chinese after hearing the prime types of DO,PO in Chinese.In Experiment 2,participants were requested to describe similar pictures but after hearing the prime types of Topic-DO,Topic-PO,DO,and PO.In each experiment,the proportions of their production of DO,PO sentences following prime sentences are then compared with baseline condition.The two experiments together found that: 1)Both L2 and L1 Participants produced more DO responses following DO primes and more PO responses followingPO primes,in comparison to the baseline.2)For L2 participants,Topic-DO primes elicited more DO responses in comparison to the baseline,and Topic-DO primes behaved like DO primes just as Topic-PO primes like PO primes.3)For L1 participants,Topic-DO primes elicited more DO responses in comparison to the baseline,but Topic-DO primes produced less DO responses than DO primes,opposite to the phenomenon that Topic-PO primes behaved like PO primes.The results of the two experiments illustrated that Chinese L2 learners of English and Chinese native speakers process differently in grammatical encoding of concepts.L2 learners first mapped from concepts onto grammatical functions,then onto word order based on the occurrence of only conceptual-to-function priming,supporting serial processing in grammatical encoding in L2 production,whereas Chinese native speakers mapped concepts onto grammatical functions and word order simultaneously based on the co-occurrence of conceptual-to-function and conceptual-to-order priming,being supportive of parallel processing in L1 production.The above difference may result from grammatical rules being stored in different memory system for L1 and L2 speakers,and L2 production requiring much more cognitive resources than L1 production.