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.
Keywords: English; Google Translate; Language Learning; Machine Translation; Portuguese; SyntacticPriming.
In this research, we aim to investigate whether web-based popular translation tools such as google neural machine translation (GNMT) are capable of influencing the language behaviour of the English students that use them for learning purposes. We also investigate whether English students learn from the output of the systems and how this learning takes place, i.e., whether consciously or unconsciously.
Copyright: © 2023 Resende N.