Chinese Sentence Comprehension Of Syntactic Priming Effects

Previous studies showed that priming effect could be observed when repeated critical lexical was presented between the prime and target sentence in online processing. Some researchers suggested that this effect was syntactic priming. However, other researchers argued that, due to the repeated word, it was likely induced by semantic factors. In this study, we used eye-tracking technology to investigate the nature of priming effect during sentence comprehension. Participants were asked to read temporary ambiguous Chinese relative sentences. In Experiment1, the prime and target sentences have the same verb. In Experiment2, the different verbs were presented between the prime and target sentences. Finally, Verb was treated as a between-participants and within-items random factor, syntactic structure was treated as within-participants and within-items factors, combined data were subjected to2(verb:repeated vs. different) x3(condition:baseline vs. same-structure vs. different-structure) repeated measures ANOVAs. There were53postgraduates, from Nanjing Normal University and Hohai University, participated the experiment.The results showed that:(1) In Experiment1and Experiment2, the main effect of condition was significant in regression-path time and total time in ambiguous and disambiguous area.(2) Ambiguous area ANOVAs showed that the interaction effect between sentence structure and verb condition was significant in total time. Further analysis Simple effects test demonstrated that the same-structure condition had significant shorter total time than the different-structure condition.(3) The interaction between sentence structure and verb condition was significant in total time and first-pass time in disambiguous area. Further analysis Simple effects test demonstrated that the same-structure condition had significant shorter total time and first-pass time than the different-structure condition.These results demonstrated that priming effect was driven by identical syntactic structure and this effect was lexically independent.