Structural Priming and Inverse Preference Effects in L2 Grammaticality Judgment and Production of English Relative Clauses

Frontiers in Psychology

Sun-A Kim¹  Jeong-Ah Shin²  Ran Wei³ 

[1] Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China;Department of English and Literature, Dongguk University, Seoul, South Korea;School of Foreign Studies, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, China;

关键词: structural priming;    relative clause;    sentence processing;    inverse preference effects;    production;    comprehension;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.845691

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

This study investigated inverse preference effects in L2 structural priming of English relative clauses and their potential influences on subsequent learning of target structures. One hundred fourteen Chinese learners of English at a low-to-intermediate proficiency level participated in a structural priming experiment with a pretest-posttest design. The experimental group underwent a priming task in which they orally produced syntactic structures immediately after viewing English object or passive relative clauses as primes, whereas the control group only read sentences unrelated to English relative clauses. A grammaticality judgment task and a sentence completion task were used to measure the inverse preference effect and its subsequent effects on L2 learning. The results showed the presence of structural priming and inverse preference effects in immediate production, which extended to subsequent learning of L2. In subsequent grammaticality judgments and production, L2 learners performed better with English object relative clauses than with English passive relative clauses in comparison with the pretest. The results are discussed in terms of the structural frequency in both L1 and L2 as well as the implicit learning mechanisms of structural priming.

【 授权许可】

Unknown