Japanese EFL Learners’ Tendency Towards Syntactic Production in a Picture Description Task: Establishing a Baseline for Syntactic Priming Experiments. 

JACET Kansai Journal, 13

pp.50-61

Morishita, M., Nakano, Y., Kadota, S., Isobe, Y., Saito, M. & Hirai, A. (2011).

The present study aims to investigate syntactic planning for sentences using dative verbs. Japanese university students participated in the experiments based on two types of picture description tasks, i.e., a paper-and-pencil task and a syntactic priming task. The result of the former task indicates that the magnitude of syntactic planning ability affects choices of structures produced. In the latter task, the significant priming effect was only found in the case of lower level students. A possible explanation is that not only was their grammatical knowledge limited but also their syntactic planning ability was not yet fully developed and they tended to describe pictures by simply using prime sentences. In contrast, upper level students were less susceptible to the influence of prime sentences.