Syntactic Priming of Ditransitive and Dative Constructions within and across Languages in High School English Learners
Bibliographic record
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".