Abdalkarim Zawawi (Lancaster University): Syntactic priming in L2

spoken interaction: the case of dative alternation and particle placement
 

The present study uses corpus-linguistic methods to compare L1 with L2

speakers’ syntactic priming of the dative alternation and the verb-particle

constructions in task-based conversation. Syntactic priming is a cognitive and

social well documented phenomenon in language users’ written and spoken

production (Ferreira, 2003). Following exposure to a given language form,

language users tend to implicitly repeat the same or a related form in a

subsequent language production (Branigan, 1995, p. 940). The lexical shared

items between a prime and a target are also believed to strengthen the

syntactic priming effect; a phenomenon referred to as lexical boost (Pickering

& Ferreira, 2008, p. 437). Early investigations made use of experimental tasks

in a lab context and found evidence for syntactic priming. For example, using

picture description, or sentence completion tasks, L1 speakers were primed

by alternating language forms, e.g. the dative construction, the passive voice

(Bock, 1986; Pickering & Branigan, 1999). Later studies in the L2 context

confirm the implicit activation and therefore reproduction of syntactic

structures that L2 learners were primed by (e.g., McDonough, 2006).

Corpus methods have recently come to the scene in priming L1 research

(Gries, 2011). The corpus studies have also found robust syntactic priming of

various alternating constructions. Very little priming research; however, has

been done on L2 spoken data. This study makes use of corpus methods,

combined with extensive manual analysis to investigate two controversial

questions in syntactic priming research, i.e. the maximum distance at which

priming can be identified, and the role of lexical boost in maximising the

syntactic priming effect. The data I use contains transcripts of L2-L2 and L1-

L1 conversations, extracted from the GLBCC spoken corpus with a size of

121128 words. The initial results indicate an even more robust priming effect

in the case of particle placement in the learner data than in the native data.

However, the analysis of the dative construction shows a greater priming

effect in the native data than in the learner conversations.

References:
Bock, J. Kathryn. 1986. Syntactic persistence in language production.

Cognitive Psychology 18(3). 355-387

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Branigan, et al. (1995). Syntactic priming: Investigating the mental

representation of language. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,

24(6), 489–506.

Ferreira, V. S. (2003). The persistence of optional complementizer production:

Why saying “that” is not saying “that” at all. Journal of Memory and

Language, 48(2), 379–398.

Gries, Stefan Th. 2011. Studying syntactic priming in corpora: implications of

different levels of granularity. In Doris Schönefeld (ed.), Converging

evidence: methodological and theoretical issues for linguistic

research, 143-165. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

McDonough, K. (2006). Interaction and syntactic priming: English L2

speakers’ production of dative constructions. Studies in Second

Language Acquisition, 179–207.

Pickering, M., & Branigan, H. (1999). Syntactic priming in language

production. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3(4), 136–141.

Conference Title

New Directions in Implicit and Explicit Language Learning Conference

Conference Country

United Kingdom

Conference Date

June 10, 2015 - June 11, 2015

Conference Sponsor

Lancaster University

Additional Info

Conference Website