統語構造への繰り返し接触が日本人英語学習者の第二言語産出時の統語的プライミング効果に及ぼす影響

抄録

　　Automatization of lexical and syntactic processing is one of the significant factors promoting fluency in speech commutation. EFL learners, including Japanese EFL learners, are said to lack automaticity in syntactic processing. However, how they learn to automatize syntactic processing has not been clarified. This study examined how Japanese EFL learners’ skills at producing syntactic structures are learned by investigating the mechanism of the syntactic priming effect and the effects of repeated exposure to the syntactic structures. A picture description task with spoken primes and targets was conducted to examine whether Japanese EFL learners’ syntactic priming effect persists with filler sentences (lags) intervening between primes and targets. The results show that a persistent syntactic priming effect was observed with the Prepositional–Object (PO) primes in the long-lag condition, indicating that the learners were changing their knowledge of PO sentence structure from declarative to procedural by repeated exposure to the structure in an implicit learning mechanism. Moreover, the proportion of cumulative PO Priming in the long-lag condition was significantly larger than the proportion of cumulative PO Priming in the no-lag condition, indicating repeated exposure of the syntactic structures with spaced intervals is effective for learners to sustain and retrieve the knowledge.