インタラクションが統語的プライミングに与える影響 : スクリプト付きインタラクションタスクを用いた心理言語学的研究

抄録

The aim of the present study is to reveal some of the cognitive processes of spoken language production of Japanese EFL learners by examining whether syntactic priming found in sentence completion tasks (i.e., monologues) can also be found in scripted interaction tasks (i.e., dialogues). There were 54 Japanese EFL learners and 17 L1 English speakers involved in the study, with the data of the latter being used as a baseline. The participants sat face to face with a partner (i.e., the experimenter) and performed a picture matching task where they described pictures alternatively with their partner and judged if the pictures on both sides were the same or different. The results show that, overall, L1 English speakers used the same structures as those produced by their partner significantly more than Japanese EFL learners did, unlike the results of previous studies using sentence completion tasks in the case of prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures. This might be because the interaction tasks in the present study required the exchange of information (i.e., meaning) and the construction of syntactic structures at the same time. Such tasks might have put a higher cognitive load on Japanese EFL learners, who lack automaticity in sentence processing. The paper goes on to discuss the possibility of using syntactic priming to promote implicit learning of syntactic rules for language production.