Study On The Short And Long Term Cumulative Structural Priming Effects On The English Written Production For Junior High School Students

As a new discipline,cognitive linguistics has become more and more influential in second language acquisition.Based on this,this study focuses on one of the hot issues in cognitive linguistics--structural priming.Structural priming is a tendency to repeat the syntactic structures comprehended or produced before(the sentence comprehended or produced at first is usually called a prime,and the one produced subsequently is usually named a target).Cumulative effects of structural priming refer to the effects of many primes on the overall production rates of different targets produced subsequently.Situated within the findings of previous studies,this study examines short-term and long-term cumulative structural priming effects among Chinese junior high school students by revisiting some possible influencing factors of cumulative structural priming(i.e.relative frequency and temporal placement of prime stems,and the temporal delay between exposure phase and priming phase).From the study,it is expected to know more about the working mechanism of structural priming and to get some conducive guidance for English teaching.The study mainly consisted of two independent experiments,which investigated the short-term and long-term cumulative effects of structural priming respectively.A total number of 270 ninth graders(from six classes)participated in the two experiments.The paradigm of written sentence completion was adopted and participants only needed to complete some sentence fragments according to their first reaction.In both experiments,there were three phases:baseline phase,exposure phase and priming phase.Sentence fragments in exposure phase were designed beforehand to elicit either double object(DO henceforth)construction or prepositional object(PO henceforth)construction.Sentence fragments in baseline phase and priming phase were designed without any elicitation and participants could choose DO,PO or any other constructions to complete the fragments.Experiment 1 was carried out in the first four classes,and the only difference among the four classes lay in the prime stems of experimental material in exposure phase:Class 1 was given the material all made up of DO prime stems;Class 2 of PO prime stems;Class 3 of DO prime block and then PO prime block;Class 4 of PO prime block and then DO prime block.Two weeks later,Experiment 2 was carried out in another two classes,and the only difference between the two classes was also the prime stems of experimental material in exposure phase:Class 5 was given the material all made up of DO prime stems;Class 6 of DO prime block and then PO prime block.Compared with Class 1 and 3 in Experiment 1,a one-week interval between exposure phase and priming phase was added in the two classes in Experiment 2.Although the two experiments were independent of each other,Experiment 2 acted as a supplement to Experiment 1 because it made a further investigation on the persistence of cumulative priming effects.Data from Experiment 1 revealed that:(1)the proportion of DO construction produced by subjects from Class 1,3 and 4 in priming phase was significantly higher than that in baseline phase,and the proportion of PO construction in priming phase was found to increase significantly only in Class 2;(2)in priming phase,the proportion of DO construction in Class 1 was notably higher than that in Class 3 and 4,while it showed no notable difference between Class 3 and 4.Data from Experiment 2 showed that:(1)the proportion of DO construction in Class 5 and 6 in priming phase was still significantly higher than that in baseline phase,and the proportion of PO construction in priming phase was still found to increase insignificantly in Class 6;(2)in priming phase,the proportion of DO construction in Class 5 was notably higher than that in Class 6;(3)there existed no significant difference of the proportion of DO construction in priming phase between Class 1 and 5,and so did it between Class 3 and 6.Results of the two experiments inferred that:(1)with or without existence of temporal delay between exposure phase and priming phase,repeated production of prime sentences significantly affected subsequent production of target sentences,and the effects were especially notable for the less frequently produced DO construction;(2)influence of skewed frequency was more notably observed than even frequency no matter for short-term(without temporal delay)or for long-term(with one-week temporal delay)cumulative effects,but there was no significant difference about the structural priming effects between the two conditions with different temporal distributions of prime sentences;(3)a one-week delay did not attenuate the magnitude of cumulative structural priming.Findings of this study corroborate and strengthen earlier claims about the implicit learning account as working mechanism of structural priming.Furthermore,some suggestions are obtained for English teaching in terms of cognitive linguistics.For example,a great many examples rather than grammatical rules should be given to students in the process of grammar teaching;the principle about information input closely correlated with students’ output should be kept in teachers’ mind before they design any teaching tasks.