Clasificación de los Instrumentos Financieros

The overall greater prime-target pair distance in the L2 data may suggest that the L1 participants tend to repeat a verb-particle prime a little faster than the L2 participants (see Table 4.10). However, no evidence was found in the current L1or L2 data to suggest that the verb-particle use of a VP NP PRT or a VP PRT NP can be explained by the prime-target distance as an individual, independent variable.

Interestingly, the prime-target distance’ significance in L1-L1 conversation is much closer to the 0.05 threshold than some of the other priming-related predictors e.g., (p = 0.950) for main verb lemma match in L1-L1 or (p = 0.696) for main verb lemma match in L2-L2 (see Table 4.5 and Table 4.7). The near-significant prime- target pair distance predictor in the L1-L1 conversations could be explained by the higher frequency of verb-particle use by L1 participants. This translates to more exposure to the target construction, which therefore increases the likelihood of higher verb-particle use by L1 participants (Luka & Barsalou, 2005, p. 452), (see Table 4.1).

An important finding to point out is that the interaction of verb-particle prime and prime-target distance emerged statistically significant in predicting the verb- particle use in the L1-L1 conversations (see Table 4.9). That is, the distance in AS- Units separating prime-target pairs affects the size of verb-particle priming to make it

171

a statistically significant predictor of the target. It could be argued, therefore, that there is a verb-particle priming effect in the L1-L1 but only if the prime-target distance interaction with the prime is considered. Such an interaction could not be observed in the L2-L2 conversations (see Table 4.9). The lack of interaction between prime and prime-target pair distance in the L2-L2 conversations begs the question of whether the prime-target pair distance is at all relevant to strength of syntactic priming in L2-L2 production. I will return to the relevance of the prime-target pair distance to syntactic priming in the general discussion (see section 7.1).

Finally, the analysis did not detect any evidence for a conclusive threshold for a particular distance at which priming begins to decay. However, at least in the case of VP NP PRT primes, there seems to be a tendency for L1 speakers to repeat their verb- particle prime when the prime-target distance is less than 33 AS-Units (see Figure 4.6). It appears that the tendency to repeat the same prime verb-particle variants starts to diminish in both data sets with the increase in the prime-target distance as the speakers become more likely to change their verb-particle variant following a verb- particle prime.

4.6.3 Lexical boost

Another objective of this chapter is to assess the proposal that the similarity in the verb lemma between primes and targets increases the strength of the priming effect (see section 2.13). No evidence was found in the L1-L1 or L2-L2 data for a relation between the verb-particle variant in the targets and main verb lemma match as an independent variable. However, we can see a tendency in the L1-L1 and L2-L2 production whereby over 70% of the particle placement prime-target pairs that share the same main verb lemma identity are of the same verb-particle variants (see Table 4.13). Therefore, it might be that the matched prime-target pair main verb lemmas can

172

encourage the production of the same verb-particle variant in the prime to appear in the target (e.g., Gries, 2005). Similarly, the matched particle and the matched direct object between prime-target pairs seem to encourage the production of the same target that was used in the prime. This can also be taken as an indication for the relevance of the general similarity effect to the use of either particle placement variants.

Most importantly, the GLM analysis of the L2-L2 conversations provided evidence for the lexical boost effect where the prime-target main verb lemma match improves the strength of the priming effect (see Table 4.9). Such an interaction between particle placement primes and the prime-target main verb lemma match was not observed in the L1-L1 conversations (see Table 4.9). The lack of support for the lemma identity effect in the L1-L1 conversations is contrary to Gries (2005) and Szmrecsanyi (2005) who both did find lemma identity interaction with the particle placement primes in corpus-based analysis of L1-L1 spoken production.

Similarly, there was a significant interaction between the L2-L2 particle placement primes and the shared direct object between particle placement’s primes- target pairs (see Table 4.9). Again, such an interaction was not observed for the L1-L1 conversations. The interaction between particle placement primes and the shared direct object in prime-target pairs is indicative of a general similarity effect on the use of particle placement construction. This finding is in line with Cleland and Pickering (2003) who found evidence for enhanced noun-phrase structure priming when prime- target pairs shared the same head noun (please see section 2.13.3). The lexical boost finding in the L2-L2 conversations can be interpreted in the light of the interactive alignment model where alignment on the lexical level, where the main verb lemma the direct object are repeated, encourages alignment at other levels, (e.g., the syntactic level in this case where verb-particle variants are also repeated), (Garrod & Pickering, 2004, p. 9).

173

Another interesting finding from the particle placement analysis is the lack of support for interaction between particle placement primes and the prime-target pairs’ shared particles (please see Table 4.9). This finding is in harmony with most studies that looked into syntactic priming and did not find evidence in support for the role of function words in enhancing the priming effect (Bock, 1989; Ferreira, 2003; Fox Tree & Meijer, 1999; Pickering & Branigan, 1998). It may well be that the lexical boost of the content words variables, i.e. main verb lemma matched and the direct object overlap, are likely to encourage syntactic priming given that they typically have more influence on the persistence of syntactic structures relative to function words, (e.g., particles and prepositions), (Ferreira, 2003, p. 380).

Finally, it could be argued that the news value of the direct object can be thought of as a lexical effect that influences the use of a verb-particle variant over the other. It is different from the direct object overlap predictor in that it does not only look at whether the target’s direct object overlaps with that of the immediately preceding verb-particle construction. Instead, the news value predictor records whether the target’s direct object was mentioned anywhere in the preceding five AS- Units.

For example, if we take ‘So he gives the money back to her’ in Figure 4.11 as a verb-particle target, we can see that the direct object ‘the money’ was mentioned identically prior to the target within sentences that do not include verb-particle primes. Because the direct object in the target is not discourse new, there is a preference for the VP NP PRT variant (see Figure 4.2). Given the preceding direct object that is lexically identical to the one in the target, it is possible that there is some evidence for an indirect lexical effect on the verb-particle use where repeated direct objects show a preference for the VP NP PRT verb-particle sequence.

174

Figure 4.11: German transcript 200, Speaker A: news value of the direct object predictor