Learners production of passives during syntactic priming activities

Abstract

Previous research has shown that during syntactic priming activities, L1 speakers produce more target structures when they are prompted by a lexical item that occurred in their interlocutors previous utterance. This preliminary study investigated whether L2 speakers are similarly influenced by lexical items during syntactic priming activities. Korean EFL learners from three proficiency levels carried out a picture description activity with a researcher whose interactional contributions were scripted with passive sentences. The results indicated that the learners produced more passives when they were prompted by verbs that had occurred in the researchers passives. Directions for future research to investigate the relationships among syntactic priming, lexical items, and L2 development are suggested.