Abstract
AbstractSpanish monolingual speakers often produce recipient (Pedro le da un lápiz a María) and nonrecipient constructions (Antonio le lava la camiseta a Carmen) doubled by a dative clitic. Second language speakers and heritage speakers usually avoid clitics. This study examined whether structural priming could effectively increase the production of clitics in monolingual speakers (N = 23), L2 speakers (N = 28), and heritage speakers (N = 24). Participants completed a baseline study that measured the use of clitics in a picture description task, followed by a priming treatment, an immediate posttest, and a posttest a week later. Results showed that priming increased clitic production for all groups, and that the increase was still significant a week later in L2 speakers and heritage speakers. These findings support the view that structural priming may implicate implicit language learning and considers its pedagogical implications.
Highlights
Spanish monolingual speakers often produce recipient (Pedro le da un lápiz a María) and nonrecipient constructions (Antonio le lava la camiseta a Carmen) doubled by a dative clitic
Results showed that the L2 group had problems interpreting clitic doubling constructions when the indirect object was [-human], even though they had a near-native level of proficiency
We focus on two groups of bilinguals who have been understudied in the structural priming literature: L2 speakers at intermediate stages of development and heritage speakers
Summary
Spanish monolingual speakers often produce recipient (Pedro le da un lápiz a María) and nonrecipient constructions (Antonio le lava la camiseta a Carmen) doubled by a dative clitic. The implicit learning model (Chang et al, 2006) proposes that exposure to a sentence makes speakers implicitly extract probabilistic information and create structural associations, which lead to the production of similar syntactic structures Under this view, learning is seen as mere adaptation rather than acquisition of new knowledge: the fact that speakers adjust to a specific linguistic environment by producing (or not) certain structures is considered implicit learning (Frensch & Rünger, 2003). Evidence supporting this model comes from priming research with amnesiac patients, from studies that do not involve any type of lexical repetition, and from the finding that priming is still effective after some time has elapsed between the prime and the target (Ferreira et al, 2008). To account for lexical repetition, frequency, and memory, multifactorial models of priming have been proposed (e.g., Reitter et al, 2011)
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