Chen, Hailong and Messenger, Katherine (2026) Syntactic Priming Facilitates L2 Learning of the Mandarin BEI-passive : Comparing the Role of Guessing and Repetition in Oral Production. In: 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, 2026-03-26 - 2026-03-28, MIT.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Syntactic priming, the tendency for speakers to mirror the syntactic patterns of recently encountered sentences when producing new utterances (Bock, 1986), has been shown to facilitate L2 acquisition and the development of grammatical knowledge (Jackson, 2018). Language learning via priming is commonly attributed to implicit, error-based learning mechanisms (Chang et al., 2006), whereby prediction errors (i.e., the mismatch between expected and actual input) drive adaptation. A growing body of research suggests that forced prediction (e.g., through a "guessing game" task) could lead to stronger syntactic adaptation than simple repetition (e.g., Grüter et al., 2021; Kim et al., 2025). However, most existing evidence comes from written production tasks and limited syntactic structures (e.g., datives). Thus, it remains unclear whether the benefits of prediction-based priming extend to spoken production and to typologically distinct structures such as the Mandarin BEI-passive. This study adopted a pretest-posttest design to examine whether forced prediction enhances oral production of the Mandarin BEI-passive.