Syntactic Facilitation in Sentence Production of English Dative with Cross-Language Priming

There is a tendency that a certain syntactic structure is facilitated by the previous utterance in language production. For instance, if a speaker hears or uses a dative construction in one utterance, the same syntactic structure is relatively more likely to occur again in the following utterance (e.g., bock, 1986; bock & Loebell, 1990; Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998). This study explores the effect of syntactic facilitation across languages : production in English (L2) with priming in Korean. The participants were Korean native speakers who speak English as a second language. The target structures were dative alternate structures (double object dative vs. prepositional dative in English, DAT-ACC ordered dative vs. ACC-DAT ordered dative in Korean). The methodology was based on the picture description task combined with recognition task. The procedure involved repetition of an auditory stimulus, followed by picture description. The results showed the significant effects were found only for prepositional dative utterances and very weak or no priming effects were found in double object utterances. The results indicates that syntactic repetition effects can be facilitated in the shared construction between the languages such as prepositional dative in Enlgish and ACC-DAT dative in Korean.