Literacy And Syntactic Representation ——Experimental Evidence From Structural Priming On Elderly Female Illiterate Speakers Of Mandarin Chinese

The illiterate constitutes a special population that has received much attention with regard to their cognitive abilities and development,both before and when acquiring literacy.Although numerous behavioral and f MRI-experiments have found evidence that the acquisition of literacy transforms the human brain,some questions still remain concerning whether,and if so,how literacy changes the way language is processed.Previous studies have mainly focused on the effects of literacy on phonological and semantic processing,largely disregarding syntactic processing.Structural priming,or syntactic priming,is the phenomenon that exposure to a particular grammatical structure facilitates subsequent reuse of that same structure.It is highly informative about syntactic processing and language representation,so it has been heavily scrutinized by linguists and psychologists in the last decades.The present study aims to explore the effects of literacy on language processing and the nature of syntactic representation through two experiments that use structural priming.In each experiment,thirty participants,15 literate and 15 illiterate native Mandarin Chinese speakers,were asked to complete a dialogue game with a confederate,who pretended to be another participant.In Experiment 1,the verbs in prime and target sentences were repeated,whereas they were different in Experiment2.Based on the statistical analysis of collected data,major findings are summarized in the following three points: 1)Priming has been found in both illiterate and literate participants,and the patterns of their production have no significant difference.Thus,it is concluded that literacy level has little impact on structural priming.2)Structural priming can be enhanced when the verbs are repeated in prime and target sentences,whereas other features of verbs have little influence on priming effects.3)Illiterate speakers have a stronger tendency in repeating the underlying construction in others’ utterance than literate speakers,for using repeated lexical and syntactic information is likely to reduce the speaker’s computational load in producing sentences.Moreover,considering these three findings and the conclusions of previous research,the current study has proposed three features of syntactic representation: lexical independence,modality independence,and literacy independence.The present study is one of the first demonstrations that combine structural priming experiments to literacy issues.It is hoped that both the method and the findings will shed light on the nature of language representation as well as the impact of literacy on syntactic processing.