We investigate how context influences the magnitude of syntactic alignment (also known as structural priming) in L2 Chinese learners’ production of Ba-construction. It is demonstrated that L2 syntactic alignment can be boosted by continuous and dynamic context and the contextual boost effect can persist and transfer to a new context.
The present study investigates whether and how context affects the magnitude of L2 syntactic alignment of Chinese Ba-construction. We adopted a pretest-posttest design wherein the context of Ba-construction input was systematically varied at the treatment stage: with video, with picture, or text only, yielding three experimental groups. Ninety-one Chinese L2 learners at intermediate proficiency level were randomly assigned to one of the three experimental groups or a control group. The video context group was exposed to Ba-constructions embedded in a complete TV episode whereas the picture context group in isolated pictures. For the text context group, only sentences containing Ba-constructions were provided. Results showed that the type of context affected reuse of Ba-constructions in subsequent production. Those engaged in video context produced significantly more Ba-constructions in both immediate posttest and delayed posttest compared with the pretest. The Picture group showed a marginally significant growth of Ba-construction production from pretest to immediate posttest. For the Text group, however, no significant gain was observed. A further between-group comparison revealed that the growth tendency of the Video group was significantly stronger than that of the Picture group. Moreover, the effect of video context persisted after a three-day lag and didn’t decay even though the context of the subsequent production task changed. This suggests that the continuity and dynamics of context enhance syntactic alignment by intensifying the interaction between comprehension and production. This is the first study to directly compare the magnitude of L2 syntactic alignment in different contexts, shedding light on the mechanism with which context facilitates L2 learning.
