1.3 Layout of the Thesis

The layout of the thesis is organized as follows:

Chapter one gives the introduction, including the background of the research, the questions which is going to be answered and the layout of the thesis.

Chapter two is the literature review which gives the readers a detailed explanation of the syntactic priming, including the definition, the paradigms, the theories and the summary of the relevant studies abroad and at home. What’s more, the value of the current study is also discussed.

Chapter three elaborately describes the design of the experiment by providing the readers the information of participants, method, procedure and material, scoring method, analysis of data, and results. 

Chapter four gives a conclusion to the experiments, summarizes the present study and discusses the limitations of the study.

 2. Literature Review

Syntactic priming has extensively been studied since the last two decades. And what gratified is some mature research results have been made with the efforts of the psycholinguists abroad and home, especially in the field of language production. This chapter offers a brief introduction on this topic. 

2.1 Definition of Syntactic Priming

Syntactic priming is a language phenomenon that the same structure will be repeated in the following sentence after a syntactic structure used (Bock, 1986). For example, if a speaker hears a sentence in a passive construction, like“The thief was caught in this shop yesterday”, the speaker tends to reuse the same construction later in his or her speech even if the meaning is totally different. This tendency was firstly found by Levelt and Kelter in 1982 and then systematically studied by other linguistics as Bock; and nowadays, it popularizes and is becoming a vital issue in psycholinguistic field in order to reveal the mechanism of syntactic structure representation. 

2.2 Paradigms and Techniques Used in Syntactic Priming

With the limitation of the research equipments, the early studies of syntactic priming in sentence production which involves complicated and implicit processes relies more on scientific methods than apparatus like fMRI. By using their intelligence, the early psycholinguists designed several paradigms scientifically and have made great success in this filed with them. In the following part, a review of some paradigms is given.  

2.2.1 Spoken Picture Description

Bock(1986) first used this paradigm in her laboratory and found syntactic priming effect. The experiment was based on the flexibility of language which meant that different expressions can be used to describe the same thing. Participants were asked to describe pictures after hearing priming sentences. The pictures had no relation with the prime. There were four types of priming sentences: ones with DO (double object) (e.g. The secretary took her boss a cake.) form, ones with PO (preposition-object) (e.g. The secretary took a cake to her boss.) form active ones (e.g. The woman watered the flowers.) and passive ones (e.g. The flowers were watered by the woman.). The results suggested that participants showed an increased tendency to describe pictures with either a prepositional-object sentence after a PO prime, or a double object sentence after a DO prime, either an active structure after an active prime, or a passive structure after a passive prime. Bock furthered her study by designing the words and themes in her experiments, and then she found that the effects were not evidently modified by the variations in terms of lexical or thematic factors. This discovery supported the assumption that some syntactic processes were organized into a functionally independent subsystem.