Structural priming as a means of learning a new grammatical structure? Priming for transitives in Dutch learners of French

This study examines whether Flemish students can learn the French (L2) passive through structural priming, which is the tendency to repeat grammatical structures. We conducted two experiments: a between-language (first language–second language [L1–L2]) and a within-language (L2) one. In Experiment 1, 50 Flemish secondary school students without prior exposure to the French passive described pictures (24 items) in French after hearing a Dutch prime: an active, a passive, or a baseline sentence. Notably, Dutch and French passives use different auxiliary verbs (e.g. “The cook is being carried by the butcher” is De kok wordt [“becomes”] gedragen door de slager and Le chef est [“is”] porté par le boucher, respectively). Midway through the experiment, we implemented a within-language intervention block of four French passive primes containing the same verb as the target. As hypothesized, no passives were produced before the intervention. Afterward, only a few participants formed passive sentences. Nevertheless, the intervention had a significant effect on overall passive production, and there was marginally significant passive priming. Additionally, both L2 proficiency and comprehension of the target structure correlated positively with passive production. To complement these findings, we conducted the same experiment with only French primes in Experiment 2, as it is often assumed that within-L2 priming precedes cross-linguistic priming. However, there was no passive priming and only a marginally significant intervention effect, with lower passive production and comprehension than in Experiment 1. Our results suggest that learners first need to understand L2 syntactic structures before they can be primed to produce them.