Syntactic Priming of Ditransitive and Dative Constructions within and across Languages in High School English Learners
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Authors
Zhang, Guofang
Date
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
syntactic priming , high school English learners , bilingual syntactic representation
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Abstract
Syntactic priming refers to the phenomenon in which people tend to produce a sentence structure that they have previously encountered. Syntactic priming research, taken as a useful tool for probing into bilingual syntactic representations and processes, has become a focus of psycholinguistics since the 21st century. However, there is insufficient research on second language learners who speak distant languages and there are no peer-reviewed studies comparing English-English syntactic priming with Chinese-English priming. Also, only a few syntactic priming studies target the high-school population. To address these gaps, this study investigated within-language (English-English) and between-languages (Chinese-English) syntactic priming on high school students. The primary aims are to understand Chinese high school English learners’ bilingual representation, and shed light on syntactic priming research in terms of how different factors influence the occurrence of priming effects. Additionally, this study provides implications for second language acquisition from the perspective of psycholinguistics. Specifically, this study examines whether priming occurs on the high-school population and how it is affected by priming languages and language proficiency. The research design adopted a typical paradigm for syntactic priming research — the Sentence Completion Task (Pickering & Branigan, 1998). Sixty high school students participated in the experiment. Half of the students were considered low English proficient and half were considered high. Participants were asked to complete a sentence completion task and a questionnaire about their background information. The data analysis involved mixed ANOVA and t-tests.
The results indicated that the types of priming structures, L2 proficiency, and priming languages interactively influenced the magnitude of syntactic priming effects. Both double objects and prepositional objects showed priming effects. Overall, the effects in the high proficiency group were larger than those in the low proficiency group; the within-language effects were also larger than the between-languages ones.
The results indicated that the low proficiency participants remained at the stage of item-specific representation in L2; L2 representation of the high proficiency participants has become abstract but still separate from L1. The findings provide some evidence in support of the developmental view of the syntactic representation. Findings also have implications for theory and practice.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.