A psycholinguistic study on syntactic processing in speaking by Japanese EFL learners

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In this research, we examined syntactic processing of Japanese EFL learners from psycholinguistic perspectives on the basis of syntactic priming experiments. Syntactic priming is the tendency of one syntactic structure in a preceding context leading to increased likelihood of use of the same structure during following language production.In a scripted interaction task, the experimenter and each participant described pictures in turn. This task required exchange of information and construction of syntactic structures at the same time and might have put a higher cognitive load on Japanese EFL learners, who lack automaticity in sentence processing. We also developed a sentence-production task intended for novice learners and examined its effectiveness through multiple implementations of the same task during English classes. We observed that the priming effects of those students gradually increased, suggesting that they might have implicitly learned the syntactic structures involved.