Chinese Garden Path Sentence Comprehension Syntactic Priming Effect

Syntactic priming is the facilitation of processing that occurs when a sentence has the same syntactic form as a preceding sentence. Eye tracking were used to investigate the nature of priming in Chinese garden path sentence. Participants read a prime sentence and a target sentence, both of which had a " NP1+VP+NP2+de+NP3 "structure. The study attempt to investigate what leads to the priming effect in sentence comprehension: strategic or syntactic? And we want to get further information that whether the priming effect depends on specific word, so we can know more about the theory about priming effect. In the experiment, there are two within-subjects variables (verb condition and syntactic type). The materials used in the experiment were matched between frequencies and strokes before they were investigated.The results of the eye-tracking showed that:(1)The interaction between verb condition and sentence type was significant when subjects read the verb region.However, further simple effects test reveals that: repeated verbs didn't reduce the first pass time and Regression Path Time in target sentences. The result suggested that repeated verbs cann't lead to priming effect.(2)The same syntax structure between prime and target sentences can significantly reduced the four processing measures.(3)The repeated verbs can significantly reduce the processing time when subjectsread the sentences that followed the same verb than different verb.It suggests that therepeated verb contributes to sentence comprehension.(4)When the syntax structure of the target sentence is the same as the prime sentence, and only if the verb is repetitive, there is priming effect.We conclude that there was a syntactic priming effect in Chinese garden path sentence comprehension and verb overlap can greatly boost the priming effect. In addition, the theory of argument structure can be used to explain priming effect in the condition of verb overlap.