The Modulation of Syntactic Priming in L2 Production by Forced Prediction and (Perceived) Nativeness of the Partner

Abstract

This paper reports findings from a written syntactic priming experiment with Korean-speaking L2 learners of English investigating whether the status of the person providing input (primes) as a native or a non-native speaker of English affects the extent to which L2 learners align their own written production (picture descriptions) with those encountered in the input. Additionally, as part of a larger investigation exploring the benefits of forcing L2 learners to predict, or guess, a partner's utterances (Grüter et al., 2021, in press), this study employed the guessing game paradigm to examine whether forced prediction would modulate effects of priming and nativeness of the input. In partial support of the Competence hypothesis (Kim & Chamorro, 2021), which states that listeners are more likely to adapt to speakers they perceive to have native competence, results from this study show that when participants interacted with a non-native partner without having to guess their responses, priming effects were reduced; this reduction was observed only in the post-test phase of the experiment. Priming effects were fully maintained in the post-test among participants interacting with a native partner, regardless of whether they had to guess or not, as well as among participants interacting with a non-native partner in the guessing-game condition. These findings suggest that while alignment is reduced when interacting with a non-native interlocutor, an explicit prediction task can mitigate this reduction, likely through engagement of higher-order processes involving social cognition, explicit awareness and/or deeper processing, an observation that is particularly relevant for the potential implementation of the guessing game paradigm in contexts of foreign language pedagogy, where it is common for language learners to receive input from other non-native speakers.