Effects of Modality Differences on Syntactic Priming in the Language Production of Japanese EFL Learners

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Abstract

Aligning linguistic representations at each level (e.g., sound, syntactic, semantic, etc.) is important for not only L1 speakers but also L2 learners to achieve smooth communication (Pickering & Garrod, 2004). At the syntactic level, previous studies revealed that learners’ repetitive use of the same structure with written primes (syntactic priming), the preference of Prepositional-Object (PO) targets compared to Double-Object (DO), and the lowest priming with uncontrolled spoken primes (Morishita, Satoi, & Yokokawa, 2010; McDonough, 2006; Morishita, 2011a). However, the effect of modality has not been clarified. Thus, the emergence of syntactic priming by presenting both spoken and written primes needs to be elucidated. The current study conducted a picture description task with controlled spoken primes to investigate whether the differences of output modality (i.e., spoken or written) and verb (i.e., same or different between primes and targets) affect Japanese EFL learners’ syntactic priming. The participants described pictures in either forms after listening to the primes with a PO, DO, or filler. The results show that a priming effect was observed in both modalities, indicating learners successfully understood the primes. Therefore, syntactic structures were activated by the spoken primes, and it enforces syntactic processing when learners encounter the same structures again.

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