This study investigated how Korean EFL learners’ proficiency and lexical overlap influenced syntactic priming effects in English causative constructions. Forty-four learners participated in picture-selection and sentence-production tasks across a pre-test, an immediate post-test, and a delayed post-test. The experimental group received priming exposure, whereas the control group did not. In the delayed post-test, participants were further divided into same-verb (have) and different-verb (get) conditions to examine lexical repetition effects. Results for the first research question showed that lower-proficiency learners demonstrated significant reductions in reaction times from pre- to post-tests, indicating robust priming effects in reaction times. Regarding the second research question, accuracy results revealed a significant three-way interaction among lexical overlap, proficiency, and test time: lexical overlap facilitated greater gains particularly for lower-proficiency learners, aligning with developmental accounts suggesting early-stage learners rely more on explicit memory and repeated lexical cues. However, reaction times did not show a comparable interaction, likely due to the cognitive complexity of sentence generation and limited cumulative exposure. Overall, the study highlights that repeated exposure and lexical overlap can support L2 syntactic development (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2017), especially for lower-proficiency learners.
Won et al. (2026) studied this question.