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

本研究在句法启动实验的基础上，从心理语言学的角度考察了日本英语学习者的句法加工。句法启动是指在前一个语境中的一个句法结构在随后的语言产生中的使用倾向，这种倾向导致在后一个语境中使用相同句法结构的可能性增加。这一任务需要同时进行信息交换和句法结构的构建，可能会给缺乏句子处理自动性的日本EFL学习者带来更高的认知负荷。我们还开发了一个针对新手学习者的练习-制作任务，并通过在英语课堂上多次执行同一任务来检验其有效性。我们观察到，这些学生的启动效应逐渐增加，这表明他们可能已经内隐学习了所涉及的句法结构。

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.