Crosslinguistic structural priming of passives in sentence comprehension: evidence from Chinese proficient EFL learners
<p>Crosslinguistic structural priming occurs when prior experience with a linguistic structure in one language facilitates the production and/or comprehension of similar structures in another language. This psycholinguistic phenomenon has been intensely investigated in bilinguals, but most res...
| Tác giả chính: | |
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| Tác giả khác: | |
| Định dạng: | Luận văn |
| Ngôn ngữ: | English |
| Được phát hành: |
2023
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| _version_ | 1826311276406505472 |
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| author | Gong, Y |
| author2 | Faitaki, F |
| author_facet | Faitaki, F Gong, Y |
| author_sort | Gong, Y |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | <p>Crosslinguistic structural priming occurs when prior experience with a linguistic structure in one language facilitates the production and/or comprehension of similar structures in another language. This psycholinguistic phenomenon has been intensely investigated in bilinguals, but most research centres on the processes involved in language production. As such, crosslinguistic structural priming in language comprehension remains largely understudied, and there are considerable theoretical uncertainties over the mechanisms of bilingual structural representation and sentence processing during priming. Moreover, it is unclear how crosslinguistic priming interacts with language directions (L1 to L2 and L2 to L1). To address these gaps, this research project aims to examine and compare crosslinguistic structural priming effects across both language directions in Chinese EFL learners’ sentence comprehension, focusing on the passive constructions that pose learning challenges for Chinese-English bilinguals.</p>
<p>Utilising a non-cumulative self-paced reading experimental paradigm, this study investigated whether reading passive relative clauses (RCs) in one language (L1/L2) would accelerate the subsequent processing of garden-path target sentences in the other language (L2/L1). The garden-path targets were temporarily ambiguous between past-tense active structures (initial interpretation) and reduced passive RCs (correct interpretation). Participants were adult Mandarin Chinese speakers with upper-intermediate to advanced English proficiency, who were randomly assigned into four experimental groups: L1-L2 prime group, L1-L2 no-prime group, L2-L1 prime group, and L2-L1 no-prime group. Participants’ reading time for target sentences were compared between prime and no-prime groups, and across language directions.</p>
<p>The results indicated crosslinguistic structural priming from L1 to L2, and there were effects of whole language activation (activation of the entire target language during priming). L2 to L1 priming was not observed. The L1-L2 priming provided evidence for the residual activation account of structural priming, and/or an implicit learning account. The absence of L2-L1 priming might be attributed to the weak priming magnitude and the potential priming from L2 actives to L1 passive RCs. The different priming magnitude between the two directions corroborated the inverse frequency effect as suggested by the implicit learning account. Overall, the findings supported a shared-syntax mechanism of structural representation in proficient bilinguals, as well as a two-stage account of syntactic processing in sentence comprehension.</p> |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T08:07:24Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oxford-uuid:face6f8e-158e-41a9-ab0f-2fd2bc1955ce |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T08:07:24Z |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:face6f8e-158e-41a9-ab0f-2fd2bc1955ce2023-11-01T08:34:54ZCrosslinguistic structural priming of passives in sentence comprehension: evidence from Chinese proficient EFL learnersThesishttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_bdccuuid:face6f8e-158e-41a9-ab0f-2fd2bc1955ceEnglishHyrax Deposit2023Gong, YFaitaki, F<p>Crosslinguistic structural priming occurs when prior experience with a linguistic structure in one language facilitates the production and/or comprehension of similar structures in another language. This psycholinguistic phenomenon has been intensely investigated in bilinguals, but most research centres on the processes involved in language production. As such, crosslinguistic structural priming in language comprehension remains largely understudied, and there are considerable theoretical uncertainties over the mechanisms of bilingual structural representation and sentence processing during priming. Moreover, it is unclear how crosslinguistic priming interacts with language directions (L1 to L2 and L2 to L1). To address these gaps, this research project aims to examine and compare crosslinguistic structural priming effects across both language directions in Chinese EFL learners’ sentence comprehension, focusing on the passive constructions that pose learning challenges for Chinese-English bilinguals.</p> <p>Utilising a non-cumulative self-paced reading experimental paradigm, this study investigated whether reading passive relative clauses (RCs) in one language (L1/L2) would accelerate the subsequent processing of garden-path target sentences in the other language (L2/L1). The garden-path targets were temporarily ambiguous between past-tense active structures (initial interpretation) and reduced passive RCs (correct interpretation). Participants were adult Mandarin Chinese speakers with upper-intermediate to advanced English proficiency, who were randomly assigned into four experimental groups: L1-L2 prime group, L1-L2 no-prime group, L2-L1 prime group, and L2-L1 no-prime group. Participants’ reading time for target sentences were compared between prime and no-prime groups, and across language directions.</p> <p>The results indicated crosslinguistic structural priming from L1 to L2, and there were effects of whole language activation (activation of the entire target language during priming). L2 to L1 priming was not observed. The L1-L2 priming provided evidence for the residual activation account of structural priming, and/or an implicit learning account. The absence of L2-L1 priming might be attributed to the weak priming magnitude and the potential priming from L2 actives to L1 passive RCs. The different priming magnitude between the two directions corroborated the inverse frequency effect as suggested by the implicit learning account. Overall, the findings supported a shared-syntax mechanism of structural representation in proficient bilinguals, as well as a two-stage account of syntactic processing in sentence comprehension.</p> |
| spellingShingle | Gong, Y Crosslinguistic structural priming of passives in sentence comprehension: evidence from Chinese proficient EFL learners |
| title | Crosslinguistic structural priming of passives in sentence comprehension: evidence from Chinese proficient EFL learners |
| title_full | Crosslinguistic structural priming of passives in sentence comprehension: evidence from Chinese proficient EFL learners |
| title_fullStr | Crosslinguistic structural priming of passives in sentence comprehension: evidence from Chinese proficient EFL learners |
| title_full_unstemmed | Crosslinguistic structural priming of passives in sentence comprehension: evidence from Chinese proficient EFL learners |
| title_short | Crosslinguistic structural priming of passives in sentence comprehension: evidence from Chinese proficient EFL learners |
| title_sort | crosslinguistic structural priming of passives in sentence comprehension evidence from chinese proficient efl learners |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT gongy crosslinguisticstructuralprimingofpassivesinsentencecomprehensionevidencefromchineseproficientefllearners |