Structural Priming From Simple Arithmetic To Chinese Ambiguous Structures

Structural priming is a tendency that people would like to repeat the similar structural pattern in successive clauses or sentences because of their structural similarity（Bock,1986;Bock&Loebell,1990）.Previous findings claimed that as long as the target shared similar abstract structural representation with the prime,both target and prime could be more abstract items and even independent of language.Based on Scheepers et al.（2011）and Zeng Tao et al.（2013）,this paper investigated structural priming across cognitive domains.Owning to the fact of domain generality of structural representations,mathematical equations were adopted as prime and three Chinese ambiguous structures were chosen as target（NP₁+He+NP₂+De+NP₃;Quantifier+NP₁+De+NP₂;NP₁+Kan/WangZhe+NP₂+AP）,which investigated the degree of abstraction of linguistic representations by testing the domain generality of hierarchical syntactic structure.Subjects in the present experiment were 40 students in Hunan University,with 20 male and 20 female.In order to make sure that all the materials adopted were highly accepted by subjects,a pretest was conducted.By sentence comprehension task,Eye Link 1000+was adopted for online tracking the eye movements of native speakers under three prime conditions（high-attached（7+2）x3+1;low-attached（7+2x3）+1;baseline 2+3）.Thirty sets of materials were created for each type structure.Each set was composed of a target sentence fragment,which was paired with one of three types of priming equations;either a high-attachment equation,a low-attachment equation,or a baseline equation.Subjects were asked to make a choice between high-attachment sentence comprehension and low-attachment sentence comprehension in 5000ms.The followed data analysis was based on the fact that subjects showed over 95%accuracy on equation solving.The present study proved that there were structural priming effects from simple arithmetic to three Chinese ambiguous structures.In addition,eye movements of language users were affected greatly by structural priming.When the structure of simple arithmetic was consistent with that of Chinese structure,dwell time,first run dwell time,second run dwell time,regression path duration and fixation count are reduced.Furthermore,dwell time,second run dwell time spent to process the modified component were decreased while fixation count was gently increased.