FORUM Learners ’ Production of Passives during Syntactic Priming Activities

Previous research has shown that during syntactic priming activities, L1 speakers produce more target structures when they are prompted by a lexical item that occurred in their interlocutor’s previous utterance. This preliminary study investigated whether L2 speakers are similarly influenced by lexical items during syntactic priming activities. Korean EFL learners from three proficiency levels carried out a picture description activity with a researcher whose interactional contributions were scripted with passive sentences. The results indicated that the learners produced more passives when they were prompted by verbs that had occurred in the researcher’s passives. Directions for future research to investigate the relationships among syntactic priming, lexical items, and L2 development are suggested. Syntactic priming is the tendency for a speaker to produce a syntactic structure that occurred in the recent discourse rather than an alternative structure. While debate about the mechanisms responsible for syntactic priming remains, some first language (L1) researchers have suggested that i