Abstract Summary
We investigated the contribution of syntactic and semantic structures in the oral production of locative alternations in a cross-linguistic priming experiment on L1 Chinese and L2 English speakers. The results indicate both word order and thematic role ordering similarities facilitate the persistence of using location-theme alternation regardless of language direction.
Abstract :
Cross-linguistic priming can be employed to diagnose the cross language similarities and explore when and how different levels of representations in the linguistic system contribute to priming across various languages. We report a within - participant cross - linguistic experiment between L1 Chinese and L2 English that used a structural priming paradigm to investigate the contribution of syntactic and semantic structures in the production of locative alternations (e.g. “spray water onto the wall” vs. “spray the wall with water”). The results show that participants tended to produce more location-theme alternation after location-theme prime than after theme-location prime regardless of language direction (L1 →L2 vs. L2 →L1), indicating that in addition to persisting in using the same word order across languages, speakers persisted in repeating the same mapping from thematic roles to linear surface word order positions. And the absence of cross-linguistic priming for theme-location construction could be explained in terms of the word-order differences and thematic role to linear order mapping differences between Chinese and English locatives. The findings further emphasize the integration of syntactic and semantic structures in Chinese-English priming but indicate that syntactic similarity dominates the cross-language priming of locative alternations. Moreover, the results also support a one-stage model where the processor computes in a single stage a structure that specifies both the linear order and the grammatical functions of its constituents whereas argue against a two-stage model.
