EFL Learners’ Production of Relative Clause Structure: Evidence from Priming Effect

Subject Areas : All areas of language and translation

Parinaz Khayatan ¹ , Ahmadreza Lotfi ² , بهرام هادیان ³

1 - Department of English, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran
2 - Department of English, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran
3 - اصفهان، دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی واحد اصفهان (خوراسگان)، گروه زبان انگلیسی

Received: 2021-02-13 Accepted : 2021-08-18 Published : 2022-01-01

Keywords: priming, Language Use, Implicit learning, Learners’ grammatical production, Relative clause structure,

Abstract :

Priming has become increasingly prevalent in applied linguistics and has recently been used in language teaching, being considered as the speakers’ tendency to reuse the same structure that they encounter in previous discourse on subsequent production. The present research investigated whether priming lead to EFL learners’ possible short- and long-term improvement in producing relative clause (RC) structure. Participants comprised 40 female language learners with an average age of 18-25 years old. They were equally assigned to an experimental group and a control group. The needed data was gathered through a grammatical judgment test and a picture description task. The obtained results revealed that learners’ production descriptively improved shortly after priming intervention and similarly in the long run. However, no significant improvement was inferentially observed in short- and long-term production of relative clause structure. The results were discussed in terms of structural complexity, learners’ current state of knowledge, and their proficiency levels. The findings provide insights on priming as a means of enhancing opportunities for EFL and ESL learners’ grammar production.

References:

Ameri-Golestan, A., and Nezakat-Alhossaini, M. (2012). Inverse -Inverse-preference effects in teaching EFL grammar: A priming study. Unpublished paper presented at the Akdeniz Language Studies Conference, 2012, Antalya, Turkey.

Bernolet, S., Collina, S., and Hartsuiker, R. J. (2016). The persistence of syntactic priming revisited. Journal of Memory and Language, 91, 99–116.

Bernolet, S., Hartsuiker, R. J., and Pickering, M. J. (2013). From language-specific to shared syntactic representations. Cognition, 127, 287–306.

Bock, J. K. (1982). Toward a cognitive psychology of syntax: Information processing contributions to sentence formulation. Psychological Review, 89, 1–47.

Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355–387.

Bock, K. and Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1292, 177 92.

Boyland, J. T., and Anderson, J. A. (1998). Evidence that syntactic priming is long-lasting. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Hillsdale, NJ.

Branigan, H. P., and McLean, J. F. (2016). What children learn from adults’ utterances: An ephemeral lexical boost and persistent syntactic priming in adult-child dialogue. Journal of Memory and Language, 91, 141–157.

Branigan, H. P., and Messenger, K. (2016). Consistent and cumulative effects of syntactic experience in children’s sentence production: Evidence for error-based implicit learning. Cognition, 157, 250–256.

Chang, F., Dell, G. S., and Bock, K. (2006). Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review, 113, 234–272.

Corney, M., and Mendez, I. (2015). A preposition is something you can end a sentence with: Learning English stranded prepositions through structural priming. Second Language Research, 31, 211-237.

Dell, G. S., and Chang, F. (2014). The P-Chain: Relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369, 20120394.

Ellis, R. (2008). Explicit knowledge and second language learning and pedagogy. Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 6, 1901-1911.

Hartsuiker, R. J., and Bernolet, S. (2017). The development of shared syntax in second language learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 219–234.

Jackson, C. N., and Ruf, H. T. (2017). The priming of word order in second language German. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38, 315–345.

Kaan, E., and Chun, E. (2017). Priming and adaptation in native speakers and second-language learners. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–15.

Kaschak, M., Kutta, T., and Jones, J. (2011). Structural priming as implicit learning: Cumulative priming effects and individual differences. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 1–7.

Kaschak, M., kutta, T., and Coyle, J. (2014). Long and short term cumulative structural priming effects. Lang Cogn Neurosci, 29, 728-743.

Kaschak, M., Kuta, T., and Schatschneider, C. (2011). Long-term cumulative structural priming persists for (at least) a week. Memory and Cognition, 39, 381-388.

Kutta, T., Kaschak, M., Porcellini, A., and Jones, J. (2017).  Implicit and explicit memory factors in cumulative structural priming. 3, 1-24.

MacWhinney, B. (2012). The logic of the unified model. In S.M. Gass and A. Mackey (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 211–227). New York: Routledge.

McDonough, k., and Chaikitmongkol, W. (2010). Collaborative syntactic priming activities and EFL learners’ production of wh-questions. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 66, 817-841.

McDonough, k., and Fulga, A. (2015). The detection and primed production of novel constructions. Language Learning, 65, 326-357.

McDonough, K., and Trofimovich, P. (2013). Learning a novel pattern through balanced and skewed input. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 654–662.

Mysellin, M., and Levy, R. (2016). Comprehension priming as rational expectation for repetition: Evidence from syntactic processing. Cognition, 147, 29-56.

Nakamura, D. (2012). Input skewedness, consistency, and order of frequent verbs in frequency-driven second language construction learning: A replication and extension of Casenhiser and Goldberg (2005) to adult second language acquisition. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 50, 31–67.

Segaert, K., Wheeldon, L., and Hagoort, P. (2016). Unifying structural priming effects on syntactic choices and timing of sentence generation. Journal of Memory and Language, 91, 59-80.

Shin, J., and Christianson, K. (2012). Structural priming and second language learning. Language Learning, 62, 931–964.

Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74, 209-253.