Cross-linguistic Study on Visual Syntactic Priming of Imbalanced Chinese-English Bilinguals

Syntactic priming refers to the phenomenon in which an individual uses a previously used sentence to produce output when producing and understanding a sentence. The initial study of syntactic priming started in the English language and gradually spread to other languages, and went deeper into cross-language syntax. However, the current cross-linguistic syntactic priming rarely involves Sino-Tibetan language families to which Chinese belongs; there are disagreement on syntactic priming in sentence production and sentence comprehension; there are different views on the role of verbs in syntactic priming; and on the level of bilingualism. The role of the role played in syntactic priming is not clear. In this study, two experiments were designed to solve the above problems. The visual prime and auditory prime methods were used, and the image description paradigm was used to initiate bilingual bi-directional syntactic study of the same batch of Chinese English forty-six subjects. The study contains four sentence patterns that are most commonly used in syntactic priming studies: active and passive sentences, double-object sentences, and preposition. The following results are obtained: 1. there is a bidirectional cross-channel syntax priming between English and Chinese; 2. Verb dependence has a sentence-specificity and may expand to a larger cognitive burden. In other sentence patterns, the possibility of such expansion decreases as the frequency of use of the sentence itself increases; 3. As the level of English increases, the efficiency of syntactic priming increases.