Syntactic Priming and Lexical Effects in Producing English Dative Constructions by Korean Speakers

Abstract

This study uses a sentence recall task to investigate syntactic priming effects in English prepositional object dative (PO) or double-object dative (DO) structures by Korean speakers of L2 English. The purposes were (1) to determine whether syntactic priming occurs during L2 production, and if it does, then to determine how it affects the subsequent utterance of target structures; and (2) to determine whether syntactic priming during production is lexically specific or independent. Thirty-two sets of target-prime sentences were developed using 12 dative alternating verbs, creating DO-DO, DO-PO, PO-DO, PO-PO target-prime pairs. Syntactic priming effects occurred with the PO priming irrespective of targets (whether DO or PO) but only when the verb used in the prime was the same as the verb used in the target. The results suggest that lexical dependency of syntactic knowledge during L2 production does not accord with the lemma stratum model. A pedagogical implication of successful learning of lexical entries is discussed.