The phenomenon of priming is a form of persistence that has been widely employed as a powerful research methodology suitable to probe into the mental representation of concepts. This chapter discusses a psycholinguistic priming experiment conducted in an L2 acquisition context. Prompted by previous studies with native speakers of English (Bock and Loebell 1990; Hare and Goldberg 1999), this empirical research aims to ascertain whether, and to what extent, constructional priming plays a part in the learning process of two groups of Italian university students of English, whose L2 proficiency corresponds to the B1 and B2 levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of Europe 2001). The experiment results suggest that syntax-semantics mapping occurs in the mind of Italian learners of English: they yielded constructional generalizations, an outcome that was largely unexpected since two of the syntactic patterns contained in the experiment, viz. the double-object and the fulfilling constructions, are not part of the Italian language construct-i-con, thus amounting to a higher level of complexity for the subjects.
The role of syntax and semantics in constructional priming. Experimental evidence from Italian university learners of English through a sentence-elicitation task
BAICCHI, ANNALISA
2016-01-01
Abstract
The phenomenon of priming is a form of persistence that has been widely employed as a powerful research methodology suitable to probe into the mental representation of concepts. This chapter discusses a psycholinguistic priming experiment conducted in an L2 acquisition context. Prompted by previous studies with native speakers of English (Bock and Loebell 1990; Hare and Goldberg 1999), this empirical research aims to ascertain whether, and to what extent, constructional priming plays a part in the learning process of two groups of Italian university students of English, whose L2 proficiency corresponds to the B1 and B2 levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of Europe 2001). The experiment results suggest that syntax-semantics mapping occurs in the mind of Italian learners of English: they yielded constructional generalizations, an outcome that was largely unexpected since two of the syntactic patterns contained in the experiment, viz. the double-object and the fulfilling constructions, are not part of the Italian language construct-i-con, thus amounting to a higher level of complexity for the subjects.
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