The syntax of adult second language (L2) speech can differ from that of natives even at very high levels of proficiency; this divergence has been attributed to problems in representing or processing the new syntax. I report experiments from my PhD that have used syntactic priming to investigate language production in native and non-native speakers of Spanish. Syntactic priming is the tendency for people to repeat a syntactic structure they have heard in an immediately preceding, but otherwise unrelated sentence.
Patterns of priming are informative about the nature of underlying syntactic representations, implying that the speaker possesses an abstract representation for the persisting structure and that use of this structure is facilitated through previous processing. Some recent research on syntactic priming suggests an inverse preference effect – more priming is seen for less known structures than better known structures. Because L2 learners have less experience with syntactic structures in the target language than a native speaker of that language, the procedures for processing these structures will be weaker and this would predict more priming in non-natives than natives. In addition, if a structure is shared across languages, there may be some transfer of preferences for this structure from the first language to the L2.
To investigate these issues, two initial experiments looked for priming of passive vs. active structures in different groups of Spanish speakers. Results showed a stronger priming effect in L2 speakers than in native speakers. A third experiment is being run at present looking for priming of subject-verb vs. verb-subject forms in similar groups.