The Impact Of Syntactic Complexity On Priming Effects Within Second Language

In verbal communication,people tend to use the sentence structure they have just heard or spoken.This phenomenon is called syntactic priming.The research on syntactic priming has expanded from first language to second language.Most researchers,however,have only focused on simple sentence structures,like dative structure and passive and active sentences.Complex structures which are also important to second language learners received little attention.Whether the complexity of sentence structure affects the priming effects has not been revealed clearly and the role of second language proficiency in syntactic priming still remains controversial.Thus,taking senior high school students as the subjects,this study has designed non-priming experiment and priming experiment,adopting embedded interrogative question as representative of complex sentence structure and double-object structure as representative of simple sentence structure.It aimed to answer the following questions:(1)Does syntactic priming facilitate the production of double-object structure? If yes,does second language proficiency affect priming?(2)Does syntactic priming facilitate the production of embedded interrogative questions? If yes,does second language proficiency affect priming?(3)Is there significant difference in priming effect between target sentences with varied complexity? Is there significant interaction between syntactic complexity and L2proficiency?All the data collected were analyzed with the software SPSS and the major findings are as follows:(1)There exist priming effects when the target structure is a simple structure.That is to say,syntactic priming can facilitate learners to produce more double-object structures.As for the role of L2 language proficiency,low level learners are more sensitive to the syntactic priming.(2)There exist priming effects when the target structure is a complex structure.In other words,syntactic priming can also benefit the production of complex sentencestructure.However,language proficiency level does not have a significant effect on priming effect.But subjects with higher L2 proficiency are more sensitive to syntactic priming to some extent.(3)No significant difference is found in priming between target sentences in varied complexity.But there exists interaction effect between syntactic complexity and the second language proficiency.Subjects with higher L2 proficiency show higher sensitivity to the change of the syntactic complexity regarding to priming effects.The present study has enriched the knowledge in literature by comparing the priming effects between simple and complex sentence structures and the results have implications for English teaching.