Machine summary:
"In addition, control groups were needed to provide a baseline against which the results of the experimental treatment can be compared to find out whether the outcome is due to priming, the level of proficiency, memory ef- fect, or other intervening factors A researcher developed questionnaire in the form of a preference test, was given to thirty Persian native speakers to see what kind of structures they use when reporting a question or a request.
To address the first research question, which asked about the occurrence of syntactic priming in L2, the data were analyzed using a 2 x 2 analysis of variance with score as the dependent variable and group (Experimental and Control) and proficiency (High and Mid) as independent variables.
This question has been the focus of research in psycholinguis- tic studies of SLA concerned with whether syntactic priming facilitates retention or implicit learning (see Bock & Griffin, 2000; Seger, 1994).
In addition to language production, syntactic priming has been researched with respect to issues such as first and second language comprehension, language processing, the mental representation of language among native speakers, bilin- guals, and second language learners, and last but not least the impact of syntactic priming on retention or learning (Bock, 1986; Bock & Griffin, 2000; Branigan et al.
In fact, syntactic priming researchers have paid much attention to the issue of retention or implicit learning - that is, whether the effects of syntactic priming are long-lasting and result in learning the particular structure (Bock & Griffin, 2000) or they are short-lived and decay over time (Branigan et al."