Syntactic priming in L1 and L2 Spanish

"Syntactic priming " refers to the tendency people have to repeat the type of sentence construction used in an immediately preceding, unrelated sentence. This effect suggests the existence of abstract mental representations for particular syntactic constructions, independent of particular words and meanings. Priming also appears to facilitate the use of a particular construction when it is otherwise unlikely to be produced, due to processing limitations or preferences for an alternative form. The current study looked at syntactic priming of the passive construction in Spanish speech production. The passive is commonly found in spoken English but is not frequent in spoken Spanish. The study employed a dialogue game in which a naïve participant (either a native Spanish speaker or an L2 Spanish speaker) and a confederate of the experimenter (a native Spanish speaker) took turns to describe pictures to each other. Each picture could be described using either a passive or active construction. The confederate followed a script specifying which construction to use, and priming was looked for in the form of the immediately subsequent utterance of the naïve participant. Preliminary results showed a small priming effect of the passive construction in native speakers of Spanish, and a larger priming effect in the L2 speakers. The implications for syntactic represenation and processing in a second language are discussed