Structural Priming From Simple Arithmetic To Chinese Specific Structure

Based on Scheepers et al.(2011) and Scheepers & Sturt(2014), this paper investigated structural priming across cognitive domains. Structural priming refers to the phenomenon that structures which people recently have processed tend to affect how people subsequently process structures. Different from sentence priming, structural priming can be primed by abstract structures besides sentences. As hierarchical structures existed both in arithmetic and syntactic structures, this paper continued to prime Chinese NP1+You+NP2+Hen+(AP) by arithmetic, asking Chinese native adults and children respectively to finish two tasks, namely sentence completion task and sentence comprehension task, for the purpose of verifying structural priming from simple arithmetic to Chinese specific structure.This research was composed of adults group and children group, each covering two tasks: the sentence completion task and the sentence comprehension task. While the former represented language production, the latter represented language comprehension. All of the data was presented through paper questionnaires. The primes consisted of high-attachment equations, low-attachment equations and baseline equations in both the two tasks. In the sentence completion task, the targets were linguistic fragments, for example, A:Xiaoli you ke zuanjie hen_____ ‘Xiaoli having(has) a diamond ring(which) is very…’. Then sentence could be completed like A1: Xiaoli you ke zuanjie hen kaixin ‘Xiaoli, having a diamond ring, is very happy’, forming high-attachment; or A2: Xiaoli you ke zuanjie hen shanyao ‘Xiaoli has a diamond ring which is very shining’ forming low-attachment. In the sentence comprehension task, the targets were ambiguous structures, for example, B: Laowang you ge nver hen jiaoao ‘Laowang is very proud for having a daughther’or ‘Laowang has a daughter who is very proud’. Under this sentence were two meaning choices:B1: Laowang hen jiaoao ‘Laowang is very proud’, forming high-attachment. B2: Nver hen jiaoao ‘Daughter is very proud’, forming low-attachment. Participants need to make a choice after solving an equation. The two tasks aimed to verify whether the structure of equations affected the tendency of producing or comprehending sentences.The results showed that there were structural priming effects from simple arithmetic to Chinese specific sentence production and comprehension. What’s more, children showed greater structural priming effects than adults in the two tasks. In conclusion, arithmetic and language shared similar structural representations to some extent.