Syntactic priming effect is defined as a tendency that speakers are more likely to use the syntactic structure in the case that the same structure was used in a preceding sentence compared to the case in which a different syntactic structure was used in a preceding sentence. The purpose of the study is to investigate the difference of the syntactic persistence between young and adult EFL learners. Also, the present study investigated the implicit learning effect. Participants consist of three groups: elementary school students, middle school students, and university students. For the implicit learning effects, each participant took part in the experiment three times with an interval with ten days. As a result, the salient priming effects and implicit learning effects were observed in university students. Weak effects were shown for middle school students and the weakest effects for the elementary school students. Especially, the priming effects on passive and double object dative structure were not observed for the elementary school students, weak for the middle school students, and strong for the university students. The results imply that young EFL learners who are in lack of cognitive prerequisite on L2 linguistic forms are limited to both the priming effects and implicit learning effects. Pedagogically, the young learners who are in lack of cognitive prerequisite knowledge require more explicit instruction for L2 grammar.
1. Introduction
2. Theoretical Background
3. Method
4. Results and Discussion
5. Conclusion