The effects of priming in the production of L2 morphology

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that priming may be a useful method in facilitating second language (L2) learning, yet there has not been any investigation about how priming can trigger the development of morpho-syntactic forms in the L2. As such, this study was motivated by the need to investigate the effects of priming in the production of morphology, a domain which poses much difficulty for L2 learners. The study examines whether exposure to grammatical and ungrammatical morphological primes can affect the accurate production of the third person singular –s in L1 Turkish-L2 English learners. The study involved a pre-test-post-test design and data was based on oral production. Participants were asked to describe pictures shown on a computer screen subsequent to different prime sentences they hear from the researcher in the confederate-scripting paradigm. The grammatical primes consisted of English sentences with verbs marked with –s and the ungrammatical primes included sentences with an omitted –s. Participant’s correct use of the target morpheme in their descriptions of the experimental items were then analyzed and compared to identify priming effects in the immediate and delayed post-tests. Results indicated an increase, for all groups, in the number of accurate use of –s from the pre-test to the post-tests; however, no significant difference was found among the groups in terms of accurate use of –s. These findings suggest that the interlanguage grammar of L2 learners cannot be altered on the basis of priming-a form of implicit learning, in the domain of inflectional morphology.