Sentence-Completion Experiment

Abstract

Results from the two experiments described in the preceding chapters made further investigation needed in order to test whether constructional priming in Italian L2 learners of English occurred also in a written context. The experiment that Pickering and Branigan conducted in 1998 represents the point of departure. They asked their participants, who were native speakers of English, to complete sentence fragments, which could be completed as a double-object construction or as a prepositional dative construction. Their results showed that syntactic priming occurred during written language production even when the structure was not repeated between prime and target fragments and the matrix verb was either the same or different; yet, when the verb was repeated, stronger syntactic priming occurred. Comparable results have been obtained from the experiment conducted in the Italian second language context, which is further evidence of the ontological status of constructions also in the mind of L2 learners.