Persistent structural priming during online second-language comprehension

Wei, Hang, Boland, Julie E., Cai, Zhenguang G., Yuan, Fang and Wang, Min (2019) Persistent structural priming during online second-language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45 (2). pp. 349-359. ISSN 0278-7393

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Abstract

We report 2 self-paced reading experiments investigating the longevity of structural priming effects in comprehending reduced relative clauses among adult Chinese-speaking learners of English. Experiment 1 showed that structural priming occurred both when prime and target sentences were immediately adjacent and when they were separated by 1 or 2 filler sentences of unrelated structures. Moreover, the magnitude of the priming effect held constant across different lag conditions. Experiment 2 replicated the persistent priming effect and ruled out the possibility that the effect was due to verb repetition priming. Taken together, the current results suggest that recent experience with a given structure can have relatively long-lived facilitation effect on the language-processing system in second-language learners. As such, structural priming may serve as a learning mechanism for second-language speakers.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: structural priming,learning mechanism,l2 comprehension
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Related URLs:
Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 08 Feb 2018 15:30
Last Modified: 21 Oct 2022 17:35
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/66243
DOI: 10.1037/xlm0000584

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