통사 점화가 한국인 영어 학습자의 영어 관계절 비대칭적 처리에 미치는 영향

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of syntactic priming as implicit learning in English relative clause processing. In the self-paced reading experiments with Korean L2-English learners, the processing of subject and object relative clauses in English were tested with syntactic priming. The phrase level which was manipulated and the sentence level were also explored to find out if there were any differences between the types of priming due to the effects of pattern drills. An in-participants design was designed so that all of the test texts could be recorded through a self-paced reading task. The experimental design is (2) Prime × (2) Target. Four pairs(pair: prime stimulus-target stimulus) were used as four conditions for two types of prime(SR, OR) and two types of targets(SR, OR). The results from L2 speakers corroborated previous findings that object relative clauses are more difficult to comprehend than subject relative clauses, indicating greater syntactic complexity of the former. We also found out (i) that the syntactic priming effect was significant but also conditional(the effect of syntactic priming appears only in subject relative clause, but not in objective relative clause), and (ii) that there was no added effect in learning when acquiring the grammar due to the influence of the pattern drill. In other words, there was no priming effect due to the influence of the pattern drill when acquiring the relative clauses, and (iii) that statistically significant effects were observed only in the upper group, and no statistically significant results were found in any of the lower groups. We conclude that the processing difficulties associated with objects as compared to subject relative clauses arises and syntactic priming can have a positive effect on learning complex relative clauses. Therefore, structural priming in L2 (second language) is practically meaningful for L2 teaching and learning.