title: Quantifying syntactic priming in oral production
title: a corpus-based investigation into dyadic interaction of L1-L1 and L2-L2
      speakers of English
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Zawawi, Abdalkarim
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2017

description: It is well established that speakers are inclined to repeat themselves or
      their interlocutors in native language (L1) and second language (L2)
      conversations. This phenomenon is largely attributed to priming, whereby
      exposure to a given language form, i.e. prime, facilitates its processing
      or that of a related form in a subsequent language production, i.e.
      target.
      
      The present study uses an innovative combination of corpus-linguistic
      methods and manual analyses to identify syntactic priming of verb-particle
      constructions (e.g., taking out a paper vs. taking a paper out), the
      dative construction (e.g., giving Emma a paper vs. giving a paper to Emma)
      and the caused-motion construction (e.g., putting the money in Emma’s
      pocket), which shares its constituent structure with the prepositional
      dative and its semantics with both dative alternation variants. These
      constructions are studied in task-based free dialogues among native
      English and L1- German L2 speakers of English. Binary logistic regressions
      from a generalized linear model (GLM) are employed to disentangle the
      priming effect from other factors that might be predictors for the target.
      The analysis of all three constructions controls for interaction between
      primes and prime-target pair intervening distance, lexical boost and
      speaker identity.
      
      The verb-particle construction results show no evidence for priming as an
      independent predictor of verb-particle variant reproduction in L1-L1 and
      L2-L2 conversations. In both language conditions, the reuse of
      verb-particle constructions can largely be explained by the same set of
      factors, i.e. the syllable length of the direct object and whether it is
      new to the discourse. The dative alternation analysis reveals evidence for
      priming in the L1-L1 and L2-L2 conversations even when controlling for
      various discourse-related predictors. In the former condition, the
      difference in length between the target’s themes and recipients and the
      discourse accessibility of the theme, along with prime-target pair
      distance and structural similarity, are found to be the best predictors
      for the target. In the L2-L2 language condition, seven factors are found
      to best predict the target in the L2 conversations in addition to the
      identity of the prime, e.g., the pronominality and animacy of the
      recipient and the concreteness of the theme. The caused-motion analysis
      shows that it is amenable to priming even though more double object
      targets follow the caused-motion primes than prepositional dative targets,
      which are structurally similar to the caused-motion primes.
      
      The study finds little support for the relevance of the prime-target
      distance to the strength of priming across constructions and language
      conditions. The results also show that the magnitude of priming is
      unaffected by the identity of the prime-target pair speaker across
      constructions and language conditions. Finally, (partial) lexical overlap
      (the so-called lexical boost) is found to encourage the reuse of particle
      placement primes in the L2-L2 condition (e.g., take out the money – put
      back the money). For the dative alternation analysis, only some lexical
      factors (e.g., primetarget main verb lemma match and the semantic class of
      the target’s main verb) boost the magnitude of dative alternation priming
      in the L2-L2, but not the L1-L1 language condition. In addition, a shared
      main verb lemma seems to increase the likelihood of reused caused-motion
      primes.
      
      Taken together, these results indicate that the L1-L1 and L2-L2 reuse of
      primed constructions is conditioned by the shared constituent structure
      between prime-target pairs, but also by the mapping of syntactic features
      to semantic and lexical features of the primed sentence.