A Study On Structural Priming In English Dative Structure Production By Chinese Learners Of English

Based on the interaction approach,this study adopted the structural priming paradigm to explore the oral production of English dative structure by 180 Chinese undergraduates of different levels of English proficiency.This study answered the following two questions: 1)Does the priming condition trigger the priming effect on the production of English dative structure? And if yes,how does the priming condition affect the production of English dative structure? 2)Does language proficiency affect structural priming? And if yes,how does language proficiency affect structural priming?This project combined qualitative study and quantitative study.To better distinguish the production differences of target structures under different priming conditions and language levels,the quantitative part of the study was 2（language proficiency: high/low proficiency）× 3（priming experiment: No P/DOP/POP）.The experimental procedure was programmed by E-prime 3.0.Qualitative study adopted the semi-structured interview to supplement the quantitative study results.This study used one-way ANOVA and the independent samples t-test for statistical analysis.One-way ANOVA was used to analyze the structural priming effect,and the independent samples t-test was used to analyze the influence of language proficiency on the priming effect.The results were that: 1)In the No P experiment,both high-and low-level participants preferred the PO structure.The participants produced more DO sentences when the priming sentence was the DO structure.The participants produced more PO sentences when the priming sentence was the PO structure.The priming effect of DOP experiments was more significant than that of POP experiments.2)In all the experiments,high-level participants produced more accurate target structures than low-level participants.High-level participants were more sensitive to structural priming.There was a significant priming effect in the high-level group in the DOP experiment.However,a weak priming effect existed in the low-level group.In the POP experiment,the production of the target structure of the high-and low-level learners was not significantly affected by the structural priming.The conclusions were: 1)The priming conditions could trigger the priming effect of the English dative structure,but the structural effect was unequal.The priming effect of the DOP experiment was more significant than that of the POP experiment.2)Language proficiency affected the structural priming effect to some degree.In brief,structural priming could improve the yield and accuracy of target structures.This study can provide some suggestions for students,teachers,and textbook editors on the acquisition of dative structure.The findings of this study can also help second language learners deepen the already recognized dative structure further and promote second language teaching.