L2 Structural Generalizations Through Structural Priming

Abstract

People often reuse the same structure as the one they heard or spoke before. This tendency is called structural priming, and this study examined L2 learners’ structural generalizations to novel items through structural priming, employing a pre- and post-test design and using the double-object dative and phrasal-verb constructions as the target structures. 45 Korean learners of English participated in the experiment, assigned to one of three structural priming treatment conditions: typical structural priming (SP), implicit structural priming (ISP), and explicitly instructed structural priming (ESP). The results showed that structural priming helped Korean L2 English learners generalize L2 syntactic knowledge to new instances and improve L2 production, and that structural priming combined with explicit instruction is more effective in the phrasal-verb construction than the other structural priming conditions. The overall results of this study are discussed in terms of its theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical significance.