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The priming of word order in second language German

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2016

CARRIE N. JACKSON  and
HELENA T. RUF
CARRIE N. JACKSON*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
HELENA T. RUF
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Carrie N. Jackson, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Pennsylvania State University, 442 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The present study investigates the priming and subsequent production of word order variation (adverb–verb–subject vs. subject–verb–adverb order) with temporal phrases (Experiment 1) and locative phrases (Experiment 2) among intermediate English–German second language learners. Participants exhibited comparable short-term priming for adverb-first word order in both experiments. In the initial baseline phase, participants produced adverb-first sentences with temporal phrases but not locative phrases, and only temporal phrases led to significant long-term priming, as measured in a postpriming phase. This suggests that at lower proficiency levels, long-term, but not short-term, priming may depend on the stability of specific semantically constrained constructions rather than more generalized syntactic representations and that such cumulative effects may be shaped by preferences for a particular construction in the native language.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , March 2017 , pp. 315 - 345
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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