| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 華語文教學系 === 105 === The first purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between structural processing and semantic processing in late second language learner’s minds by structural priming. The previous literature on structural priming focuses mostly on native speakers and early bilinguals, with only several studies that focus on late second language learners. Following the finding of Hsu and Lin (2014) that late Mandarin second language learners do demonstrate structural priming with the SVO-BA alternation, this study further investigated whether the structural priming of late second language learners could persist as long as that of native speakers or not (Kaschak, Kutta, & Schatschneider, 2012). The result suggested that do structural processing working independently of semantic processing in the mental representations of late second language learners (Bock, 1995; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006; V. S. Ferreira & Slevc, 2007)? Or structural processing is only a part of semantic processing as Pickering and Branigan (1998) have?
The second purpose of this study was to investigate that Mandarin simple verb-complement structure (e.g., 拿走(take away)、趕跑(chase run)) should be classified as a morphologically defined unit or a syntactically defined unit. Most of the literature of Mandarin simple verb-complement structure in the past only relied on informants’ intuition or structure analyzing. This study aimed to provide psycholingustics evidences using structural priming.
The two main research questions were as follows: (1) Do structural priming affect late Mandarin second language learners’ tendency of SVO-BA constructions? How long will the priming persist? Will the strength of structural priming decay, or even disappear as time goes on? (2) If the result of first research indicates that late Mandarin second language learners do exist long-term structural priming, then can Mandarin simple verb-complement structure trigger structural priming? What is the magnitude of structural priming and how long will it last that is triggered by the verb-complement?
Participants are high-intermediate level late Mandarin second language learners. The research methods included picture describing, sentence stem completion, grammaticality judgement. The participants also received memorize tasks which were designed to misdisguised participants about the purpose of the study.
The result showed that when late Mandarin second language learners were primed, they did change their SVO-BA tendency, and the structural priming persisted longer than one week. This result supported the claim that structural processing working independently of semantic processing. The result of Mandarin simple verb-complement structure showed that structural priming was triggered by receiving priming sentences with complement. The results that structural priming could persist longer than one week indicated that Mandarin simple verb-complement structure is a phrase structure.
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