| Syntactic priming can be employed to reveal the internal representation of syntactic structure.The study of syntactic priming of English passive structure is a familiar issue in the field of psycholinguistics.One main controversial concern of syntactic priming of English passive structure is to explore whether the representation of English passive structure is abstract or is semantically constrained.Therefore,the present study aims at investigating whether the representation of English passive structure of Chinese EFL learners is abstract or is semantically constrained in a syntactic priming study by addressing three research questions:Are there syntactic priming effects of active and passive sentences on the sentences completed by Chinese EFL learners? What are effects of verb types on syntactic priming effects of English passive structure? What are effects of language proficiency on Chinese EFL learners’ syntactic priming effects of English passive structure?To explore the issue,the present study adopted a 2*3*2 mixed design.The independent variables are prime sentence types including active and passive sentence,verb types including agent-patient verbs,themeexperiencer verbs and experiencer-theme verbs and language proficiency including low proficiency and high proficiency.The dependent variable is sentence types which are coded as active sentence,passive sentence and other.To collect the sentences completed by Chinese EFL learners in two written sentence completion tasks,40 senior 1 students and 40 juniors majoring in English in one of normal universities in Gansu province were invited to participate in the experiment.Two written sentence completion tasks were implemented in E-prime 2.0 software in two experiment blocks,each of which includes Instructions,Practice Test,Practice End,Formal Test and Ending.In each trial of Practice Test and Formal Test,the subjects experienced phases of Fixation,Prime and Target.The subjects first read the instructions of the experiment.And then they clicked any keys to start the experiment.In each trial of both Practice Test and Formal Test,the subjects firstly saw a 500-millisecond fixation point “+” on the screen.After disappearance of fixation,they read the prime sentence without time restraint and pressed any keys on the keyboard and then read the target.In Practice Test 1 and Formal Test 1,the subjects saw the given words to make a sentence with the given words in the bracket.They typed their answers on the keyboard without time constraint and pressed any keys after finishing one trial to move to next phase.In the Practice Test 2 and Formal Test 2,the subjects read an uncompleted sentence and typed the answer on the keyboard to complete the sentence with the right form of the given verb in the bracket.After the experiment,the researcher collected the data,coded sentences,counted each type of sentences and classified the sentences into active sentence,passive sentence and other and then processed the data in SPSS 25.The results of the present study can be shown as follows.Firstly,there are syntactic priming effects of active and passive sentences on the sentences completed by Chinese EFL learners.To be specific,active sentences have stronger syntactic priming effects on active sentences than on passive sentences.Meanwhile,passive sentences have stronger syntactic priming effects on the passive sentences than on the active sentences.These results indicate that syntactic priming effects do occur and the subjects are incline to use the same linguistic structure in the target as is exposed in the prime.Secondly,there is a significant correlation between verb types and syntactic priming effects of English passive structure.In other words,the prime of English passive structure of different types of verbs causes different priming effects on English passive sentence,indicating that representation of English passive structure is semantically constrained.Thirdly,there is a significant correlation between language proficiency and syntactic priming effects of English passive structure,indicating that the representation of English passive structure is a gradual process of dynamic development for Chinese EFL learners.Specifically,for Chinese EFL learners of low language proficiency,verb types have no significant correlation with syntactic priming effects of English passive structure,suggesting that the representation of English passive structure for Chinese EFL learners of low language proficiency is abstract.However,for Chinese EFL learners of high language proficiency,verb types have a significant correlation with syntactic priming effects of English passive structure,indicating that the representation of English passive structure for Chinese EFL learners of high language proficiency is not only abstract but semantically constrained.The findings of the present study provide evidence for the account of representation of English passive structure.In addition,the findings also provide evidence for syntactic priming as an effective teaching approach in English language teaching.The future study may explore the comprehension and production of passive sentences of theme-experiencer verb and experiencer-theme verb to reach more generalized conclusion. |
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