Study on the Effect of Structural Priming on Chinese EFL Learners’ Language Production

Abstract

Structural priming refers to the phenomenon that people tend to reuse the structure which is previously heard, read or written when a sentence is produced. It's believed that it is the structural priming that makes the sentence structure function and that priming leads to the activation of the structure. Different from previous studies, the present study aimed to investigate the effects of structural priming on language production for relative clauses from the perspectives of pauses, latency and correctness, and to examine effects brought by different patterns of priming. After reviewing the previous studies, subjects were determined who shared the same first language background and were at the same stage in second language learning. Then, experimental materials were carefully chosen. Based on these materials, an experiment was conducted, which included three stages: pre-test, priming and post-test. Priming patterns were categorized as listening and speaking, reading and writing. By analyzing the statistics, it's found that the performance between pre-priming and post-priming was significantly different. Structural priming could improve the performance in language production and exert positive effects on language production for Chinese EFL learners. Moreover, the performance based on listening and speaking priming was significantly different from that based on reading and writing priming. Different patterns of priming produced different effects. It's hoped that the study could provide some implications for the improvement of second language teaching and further suggestions for future researches in this field.