Syntactic Priming Effect in Function of Proficiency = The Case of Korean Learners of English

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Syntactic priming effect, the tendency for speakers to repeat a recently produced or encountered syntactic structure, has been reported in studies conducted with speakers of English and other typologically similar languages. The present study addresses two relevant issues: whether the phenomenon in question is also observed among native speakers of Korean whose syntax is agglutinative rather than configurational, and whether Korean learners of English show the effect when they produce second language (L2) sentences and how it interacts with their L2 proficiency. Twenty-four Korean native speakers participated in Experiment 1 in which they read aloud either one of the two alternative dative word orders in Korean at the priming stage and then described a picture using a given dative verb. The result indicated that Korean speakers predominantly produced sentences with canonical word order (i.e., agent-recipient-theme order) regardless of what the priming word order was. Another forty-eight Korean learners of English, divided into four groups by proficiency level, participated in Experiment 2. They read aloud either a prepositional dative or a double-object sentence in English at the priming stage and then produced English sentences at the following stage. It turned out that the advanced group significantly outperformed the lower groups in terms of the total number of prime-response matching cases. These findings imply that achieving a high proficiency in English comes along with the learners’ capability of processing and internalizing unitary constructional representations rather than syntactic derivational rules operating on individual lexical items, which is particularly suggestive for L2 learners whose mother tongue does not bring about such strong structural representations found in English.