| Syntactic priming refers to people’s tendency to repeat the syntactic structures that they have understood or used before,and cross-linguistic syntactic priming is a kind of syntactic priming between two languages.Cross-linguistic syntactic priming experiment has been recognized by many researchers as an effective tool for studying bilingual syntactic representation and processing mechanisms.Influencing factors of cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects is the hot topic in psycho-linguistic researches recently.A large number of relevant studies have shown that many factors including word order,thematic order,lexical repetition,second language(L2)proficiency,etc.,may influence the priming effects.However,there are still many controversies about the impact of L2 proficiency and verb consistency on cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects.This thesis aims to explore the following questions based on the developmental model of bilingual syntactic representation: 1)Are there any cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects from Chinese(L1)to English(L2)? 2)Does L2 proficiency influence cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects from Chinese(L1)to English(L2)? If the answer is yes,how? 3)What is the relationship between verb consistency and cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects from Chinese(L1)to English(L2)? 4)Are there any interactive effects between L2 proficiency and verb consistency ?To answer these questions above,we designed and conducted experiments of cross-linguistic syntactic priming from Chinese(L1)to English(L2)by using Bock’s written picture-description paradigm.There were 60 participants involved in the experiments,30 sophomores majoring in English belonged to high-proficiency group while 30 second-year high school students belonged to low-proficiency group.The experimental materials were 64 pictures with key English verbs and 64 Chinese priming sentences,in which 16 were Chinese active sentences,16 Chinese passive sentences,16 baseline sentences,and 16 filled sentences.Among them,half of the key verbs were translation-equivalent relations,that is,verb consistency,while the others were verb inconsistency.All experimental materials were automatically presented by MS PowerPoint.There were two experiments in the research.Experiments 1 was cross-linguistic syntactic priming in the condition of verb inconsistency while experiment 2 was in the condition of verb consistency.All participants completed experiment 1 first and then experiment 2,avoiding the influence of verb consistency.After the experiment,the data were sorted out and then analyzed by SPSS16.0.According to the experimental results,the following conclusions can be drawn from the study: 1)There were cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects from L1 to L2,even though the two languages were quite different.2)The difference of the priming effects between the two groups indicated that L2 proficiency was an important influencing factor on bilingual syntactic representations.In the condition of verb inconsistency,high L2 proficiency group showed cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects in passive structure but not in active structure;low L2 proficiency group showed cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects in both active and passive structures;besides,low L2 proficiency group showed stronger priming effects than high L2 proficiency group in active structure but no difference in passive structure.The reason was that bilingual syntactic representations were not fixed,but developed dynamically with the improvement of L2 proficiency,from separated to fully shared.3)The influence of verb consistency on cross-linguistic syntactic priming effects was significant.When the key verbs of the priming and target sentences were consistent,translate-boost effects would occur.4)There were no interactions between verb consistency and L2 proficiency.The results of the research provided some important implications for L2 teaching.For instance,English teachers should take those influencing factors into consideration,choose different teaching methods flexibly according to students’ L2 proficiency,make full use of verb consistency,and help students improve the sharing degree of bilingual syntactic representation in their mind,and promote their English learning efficiency and English level. |
PDF Full Text Request