The Impact of Syntactic Priming on English Language Learners' Production: A Transfer Study of Indirect Questions/Requests (original) (raw)

2010, Journal of Language Teaching and Research

This study examines the impact of syntactic priming on production of indirect questions/requests by Persian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Eighty learners participated in two experiments investigating the impact of syntactic priming on oral production and the possibility of transfer of the priming effects to a different modality. A Production experiment showed that priming resulted in increased production of the target structure by the Experimental groups as compared with production by the Control groups. A Transfer experiment showed the gains accrued by participants in the Experimental groups could also be observed in a different modality, i.e., written production. Index Terms-syntactic priming, language production, modality transfer I. INTRODUCTION Syntactic priming refers to a tendency to produce or repeat a recently produced or heard structure (Bock, 1986)that is, the phenomenon by which processing of an utterance is facilitated by processing of another one which shares the same underlying syntactic structure. This facilitation can help understand the nature of syntactic representation (Branigan, 2007). After the discovery of syntactic priming (also called structural persistence and structural priming) over 20 years ago, there have been numerous studies across a wide variety of populations. Syntactic priming has been the focus of studies with children (e.g.