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THE IMPORTANCE OF PRIME REPETITION AMONG INTERMEDIATE-LEVEL SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2017

Carrie N. Jackson  and
Helena T. Ruf
Carrie N. Jackson*
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
Helena T. Ruf
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Carrie N. Jackson, 442 Burrowes Building, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: cnj1@psu.edu
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Abstract

This study investigates whether repeating a prime sentence aloud strengthens short-term and longer-term priming of adverb-first word order among adult intermediate L1 English-German L2 learners (N = 30). Compared to an earlier study (Jackson & Ruf, 2017), in which similarly proficient L1 English-German L2 learners heard, but did not repeat, prime sentences, participants in the present study exhibited greater short-term priming for adverb-first word order during the priming phase and significant longer-term priming in a posttest phase immediately following the priming phase. However, additional analyses revealed that only those participants who exhibited stronger short-term priming without lexical overlap during the priming phase continued to produce adverb-first sentences in the posttest phase, highlighting that even prime repetition may not support longer-term priming among intermediate L2 learners more generally.

Type
Research Report
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 677 - 692
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

Portions of this work were presented at the Second Language Research Forum in 2015 and Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing in 2016. We thank Joey Bail, Jack DiMidio, Marta Millar, Alexa Rossi, Neil Shook, Ted Smith, and Liese Sippel for help with data collection and transcription; and two reviewers for their valuable comments. This research was funded by the President’s Fund for Undergraduate Research at Penn State University.

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