3. Research Design 8

3.1 Hypothesis 8

3.2 Method 8

3.3 Participants 8

3.4 Experiment Overview 8

3.4.1 Comprehension Procedure and Material 9

3.4.2 Priming and Producing Procedure and Material 10

3.5 Scoring 11

3.5.1 Scoring of Comprehension 12

3.5.2 Scoring of Repetition 12

3.5.3 Scoring of Utterance 12

3.5.4 Scoring of Priming 12

3.6 Results 12

3.6.1 Results of Utterance 13

3.6.2 Results of Priming 13

3.6.3 Discussion 14

4. Conclusion 16

4.1 Conclusion of the Research 16

4.2 Implications to First Language Acquisition 16

4.3 Limitations and Suggestions of the Research 16

References 18

Appendix 20

List of Figures, Tables and Charts 22 

1. Introduction

1.1 General Background of the Research

 With the popularity of cognitive science, many linguists try to combine their knowledge of language with the technique of psychology, trying to figure out the mechanism of language processing. As a result, many terms in psychology are introduced to the field of linguistics. Syntactic priming is an example. Priming is a psychological term at first which manifests an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus influences a response to another stimulus. After the seminal experiments of Meyer and Schvaneveldt in the early 1970s, the research on priming of many sorts flourishes in many fields, including linguistics. Syntactic priming, then, becomes the most studied one. 

 Syntactic priming, or the tendency to repeat the sentence structure a person just heard was first termed as a language phenomenon that the same structure will be repeated in the following sentence after a syntactic structure used by Bock in 1986. Because the priming effect explicates the inner process into hearable and recordable utterances, the studies of it provide the evidence to explore the nature of syntactic representation and processing as well as the evidence for the psychological reality of autonomous syntactic representations. 

Recently, the studies of young children’s language mechanism are rising. Since young children have not received too much study of grammar, their utterances can be regarded as a process whereby innate knowledge of syntactic structure (Pinker, 1984). Hence, the study of syntactic priming among children can provide a hint in the field of first language acquisition.  

1.2 Research Questions

This research aims to figure out two questions by observing the syntactic priming in sentence production in native Chinese speakers whose age are from 3 years old to 5 years old. The questions are as follows: (1)At what age would syntactic priming becomes a prominent phenomenon during children sentence production in the Chinese context? (2) How abstract are children’s early syntactic representations? By studying the sentences produced by the young children by describing target pictures, syntactic representation shall be better looked into and then syntactic processing in language production shall be better understood.