Linking syntactic priming to language development: a visual world eye-tracking study

摘要

Syntactic priming is the phenomenon that language users tend to repeat the same syntactic structure if they previously heard/produced the structure. Past research has reported the effect across various modalities and showed that it plays a major role in human language communication (Pickering & Garrods, 2004). Interestingly, some researchers make another claim that syntactic priming is a form of implicit learning (Bock & Griffin, 2000). This priming-as-learning account recently attracted a great deal of attention and previous research reported some supporting results. However, those results are only indirect evidence for the learning account and it is still unclear how syntactic priming reflects one's syntactic representations and linguistic competence under development. The current study investigated this issue by examining both syntactic priming in comprehending Japanese passive constructions with 5 and 6 year old children and their competence in producing the structure. The results demonstrated that 6 year olds have better competence over the passive construction than 5 year olds and the difference was reflected in priming. The results from eye-movements showed the effect of priming in both prediction and integration processes for 6 year olds but not for 5 year olds. The pattern of the results with 6 year olds was largely similar to that of the adult group except that the effect with the adult group was observed much earlier in time. The results demonstrated that syntactic priming reflects the stage of language development and can shed a light on how linguistic competence and representation emerge and develop.