The effect of linguistic nativeness on structural priming in comprehension

Abstract

The role of linguistic experience in structural priming is unclear. Although it is explicitly predicted that experience contributes to priming effects on several theoretical accounts, to date the empirical data has been mixed. To investigate this issue, we conducted four sentence-picture-matching experiments that primed for the comprehension of object relative clauses in L1 and proficient L2 speakers of German. It was predicted that an effect of experience would only be observed in instances where priming effects are likely to be weak in experienced L1 speakers. In such circumstances, priming should be stronger in L2 speakers because of their comparative lack of experience using and processing the L2 test structures. The experiments systematically manipulated the primes to decrease lexical and conceptual overlap between primes and targets. The results supported the hypothesis: in two of the four studies, the L2 group showed larger priming effects in comparison to the L1 group. This effect only occurred when animacy differences were introduced between the prime and target. The results suggest that linguistic experience as operationalised by nativeness affects the strength of priming, specifically in cases where there is a lack of lexical and conceptual overlap between prime and target.

Keywords:

• structrural priming
• nativeness
• comprehension
• animacy

Acknowledgements

Participants for this study were tested at the following universities and we owe the named persons a debt of gratitude for providing testing space and advertising our research to L1 and L2 speakers: The University of Manchester, UK (Wiebke Brockhaus-Grand); Universität Erfurt, Germany (Gerhard Blanken, Tilmann Betsch, Margret Seyboth, Manuela Linde); The University of York, UK (Marilyn Vihman); Liverpool University, UK (Ulrike Bavendiek); The University of Lancaster, UK (Birgit Smith), The University of Bangor, UK (Susanne Schiemenz); Friedrich Schiller Universität, Germany (Holger Diessel); Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (Louise Jansen); The University of Salford, UK (Juliet Wigmore, Charlotte Hofmann). We also thank Roger Mundry (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) and Neal Snider (University of Rochester) for invaluable statistical advice.

Notes

1. Shin and Christiansen (2012) recently published a study very similar to Bock and Griffin (2000), but with L2 learners of English. In the condition most comparable to Bock and Griffin (dative priming, lag 4), they reported a priming effect of 19.92% versus Bock and Griffin's 7% for their L1 participants. While suggestive, the data between the two studies are not directly comparable because Shin and Christiansen only primed for one structure, and did not include an L1 comparison group.

2. Function kappa.mer() on https://github.com/aufrank/R-hacks/blob/master/mer-utils.R

3. This differs from transfer of structure, which we address below.