The Developmental Model Of L2 Syntactic Representations

Syntactic representations have been a controversial area of study in recent years.The two alternative approaches dominating the field,namely the lexicalist accounts and the abstraction accounts,result in contrasting explanations about how syntactic information is represented.The lexicalist accounts support the view that the specific verb triggers syntactic information in the form of lexically-dependent generalizations bound to specific lexical items such as verbs,whereas the abstraction accounts maintain that speakers are said to have categories above the level of the lexical item from the beginning.However,the integrated accounts by absorbing the lexicalist accounts and the abstraction accounts provide an integrative explanation about how syntactic information is represented,which state that different syntactic structures are represented in different ways,these being affected by structure frequency.The evidence from syntactic representations of a second language may well support the integrated accounts that syntactic structures are represented in different ways affected by not only structure frequency but also L2 proficiency.Syntactic representations of a second language are essentially a developmental model with the progression of L2 proficiency.However,the developmental models of syntactic representations for L2 learners have also been a controversial matter in recent years.Three main developmental models of syntactic representations of a second language are proposed in recent years.Hartsuiker and Bernolet's model assumes that L2 syntactic structures are represented as lexically-specific for L2 learners with low L2 proficiency and as category-abstract for L2 learners with high L2 proficiency.Wang and Lei's model suggests that L2 syntactic representations develop from initially shared representations with L1 towards separated L2 representations triggered by specific verbs.Zhao's model holds an opposite view to Hartsuiker and Bernolet's model that syntactic representations in a second language develop from category-abstract affected by semantic integrity to lexically-specific.The study under consideration in this thesis adopted the Written Completion Sentence Task from structural priming paradigm to explore the structural priming effect and the lexical boost effect for Chinese learners of English who have differing proficiency in English,and to infer the syntactic representations of the mono-and intransitive structures for Chinese learners of English.From this investigation,the developmental model of syntactic representations in a second language will be further illustrated.The study aims to answer the following research questions:(1)Does the structural priming effect occur in the mono-transitive/the intransitive structure for Chinese learners of English with differing proficiency?(2)Does the lexical boost effect occur in the mono-transitive/the intransitive structure for Chinese learners of English with differing proficiency?(3)If the lexical boost effect occurs,does the size of the lexical boost effect change across proficiency and structure frequency?Thirty college students were recruited for this study.Participants were further divided into two groups: a high-proficiency group and a low-proficiency group.Theresearch materials used were 32 intransitive and 32 mono-transitive prime sentences followed by target fragments.The experiment design was 2(prime type:mono-transitive vs.intransitive)× 2(verb repetition: repeated vs.not repeated)× 2(language proficiency: high vs.low L2 proficiency).Research materials encompassing prime sentences and target completions were programmed via E-prime,a psycholinguistic software package.The statistical analyses were conducted by means of SPSS 25.0 to evaluate the condition differences(8 conditions).The study obtained the following results:(1)The structural priming effect of the mono-transitive and the intransitive structure occurred for both high-and low-proficiency Chinese learners of English,indicating that the prime type affected the proportion of completions.Chinese learners of English produced more mono-transitive sentences after mono-transitive primes and more intransitive sentences after intransitive primes.(2)The lexical boost effect of the intransitive structure occurred for both the high-and the low-proficiency group,indicating that the verb repetition of the intransitive structure affected the proportion of completions in both the high-and the low-proficiency group.Meanwhile,the lexical boost effect of the mono-transitive structure for high-proficiency group was evident,suggesting that the verb repetition of the mono-transitive structure affected the proportions of completions in the high-proficiency group that the participants tended to produce more mono-transitive sentences under the condition of the verb repeated,while there was no lexical boost effect of the mono-transitive structure in the low-proficiency group,suggesting thatthe verb repetition had no influence on the mono-transitive structure in the low-proficiency group.(3)The size of the lexical boost effect was larger in the intransitive structure than in the mono-transitive structure,indicating that there were developmental differences in the strength of syntactic representations of a second language,the less frequent structure was more reliant on the specific verb to trigger its syntactic information during sentence processing.The magnitude of lexical boost effect was larger in the high-proficiency group than in the low-proficiency group,suggesting that the L2 syntactic representations of the high-proficiency group tended to be activated by specific verbs rather than category or semantic integrity.To conclude,syntactic representations of English for Chinese learners of English support the integrated accounts,which are affected by structure frequency and language proficiency.Different to previous findings,the mono-transitive information is represented as category-abstract,and the intransitive information is represented as lexically-specific for the low-proficiency Chinese learners of English,while both the mono-transitive and the intransitive structures are represented as lexically-specific for the high-proficiency Chinese learners of English.Furthermore,the developmental model of syntactic representations in a second language supports Lei and Wang's model proposed by 2009 that it develops from a shared representation with L1 to an independent syntactic representation relying onlexically-specific activation.