Investigating syntactic priming cumulative effects in MT-human interaction

Abstract

Background: A question that deserves to be explored is whether the interaction between English language learners and the popular Google neural machine translation (GNMT) system could result in learning and increased production of a challenging syntactic structure in English that differs in word order between speakers first language and second language. Methods: In this paper, we shed light on this issue by testing 30 Brazilian Portuguese L2 English speakers in order to investigate whether they tend to describe an image in English with a relation of possession between nouns using a prepositional noun phrase (e.g. the cover of the book is red) or re-use the alternative syntactic structure seen in the output of the GNMT (e.g. the book cover is red), thus manifesting syntactic priming effects. In addition, we tested whether, after continuous exposure to the challenging L2 structure through Google Translate output, speakers would adapt to that structure in the course of the experiment, thus manifesting syntactic priming cumulative effects. Results: Our results show a robust syntactic priming effect as well as a robust cumulative effect. Conclusions: These results suggest that GNMT can influence L2 English learners linguistic behaviour and that L2 English learners unconsciously learn from the GNMT with continuous exposure to its output.

produção de SN1 de SN2 em inglês-L2 por aprendizes brasileiros: um estudo psicolinguístico

“…Esta hipótese encontra fundamento no fato d os falantes de português como L1 e inglês como L2 normalmente realizarem associações sintáticas entre as línguas. Deste modo, acreditamos que há tendência na utilização da construção sintática com uso da preposição of para a produção de sintagmas binominais relacionais SN1 de SN2, conforme Resende et al (2020) apresentam em seus estudos.…”

“…Não há outra possibilidade de representação da construção relacional binominal SN1 de SN2, sendo esta a única alternativa sintática possível em PB, conforme explicam Resende et al (2020). Por outro lado, em língua inglesa, esta mesma construção relacional binominal SN1 de SN2 pode ser representada de três formas diferentes.…”