Structural Priming and the Acquisition of English Dative Constructions by L1 Thai Learners

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to examine whether structural priming can facilitate L1 Thai learners’ acquisition of English dative constructions, both English DO construction and English PO construction and to investigate whether different priming conditions have different learning effects on L1 Thai learners’ acquisition of English dative constructions. The first hypothesis states that the L1 Thai learners produce English dative constructions, both DO construction and PO construction, at higher rates after receiving the structural priming experiments. However, the similar structure, i.e. the English PO construction is used more frequently than the different structure, i.e. the English DO construction. The second hypothesis states that different priming conditions have different learning effects on L1 Thai learners’ acquisition of English dative constructions. That is, less intervening sentences between prime and target sentences contribute to the short-term learning effects, whereas more intervening sentences between prime and target sentences mediate the long-term learning effects on L1 Thai learners’ acquisition of English dative constructions. The participants were 90 Thai intermediate learners of English randomly divided into three different priming conditions groups: long-lag priming group (n=30), short-lag priming group (n=30) and no-lag priming group (n=30). Data were collected from a comprehension checking task, a preference assessment task, a priming task and an immediate post-priming picture description task.

Results showed that the L1 Thai learners of English showed a significant increase in their productions of English dative constructions after receiving the structural priming experiments, suggesting that the learners acquired the English dative constructions more effectively through structure priming. Thus, the first hypothesis was confirmed by the results. Moreover, the structural priming effects were found to persist over time, suggesting that structural priming can promote long-term production of the English dative constructions among the learners. However, different priming conditions did not have different learning effects because the learners across the three priming condition groups showed similar production rates of dative sentences. Thus, the second hypothesis was not confirmed by the results. Moreover, it was assumed that structural priming was a form of implicit learning process (Bock & Griffin, 2000). The findings of the study contributed to SLA with respect to structural priming and led to some pedagogical implications.