Effect of Emphasis on Structure Priming in Language Production

An emphasized element in a sentence is usually considered to be a topic (e.g., Reinhart, 1982) and located first in the sentence. This study aims to investigate the cross-linguistic effect of 'emphasis' persistence and to investigate whether production process is facilitated in primed condition by measuring the production time. Thirty university students took part in the experiment. The picture description task was employed in cross-linguistic syntactic priming paradigm with both directions of English(L2) prime to Korean(L1) target and Korean(L1) prime to English(L2) target. The reaction time while describing pictures was also measured using e-prime. The syntactic priming effects were observed in English DO structure. Asymmetric priming effects were shown in the production time between primed and unprimed condition. No significant effects were found in the direction of English(L2) prime to Korean(L1) target, but significant effects were observed in Korean(L1) prime to English(L2). It implies that L2 production is affected by L1 stimulus while L1 production is not influenced by L2 stimulus.