Structural Priming from Simple Arithmetic Equations to Specific Chinese Structure

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2015, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (5) : 1026-1031.

PDF(462 KB)
PDF(462 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2015, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (5) : 1026-1031.

Structural Priming from Simple Arithmetic Equations to Specific Chinese Structure

Author information +
History +

Abstract

Structural priming refers to the phenomenon that structures which people recently have processed tend to affect how people subsequently produce or understand structures. Different from sentence priming, structural priming can be primed by abstract structures in addition to sentences. Scheepers et al. (2011) firstly primed subjects using simple arithmetical equations, providing evidence of abstract structural priming effect from arithmetic equations (either high or low attachment) to English relative-clause (either high or low attachment). This pioneering research also offered evidence of domain generality of structure representation. Furthermore, Scheepers & Sturt (2014) extended this structural priming effect to be directional, which means arithmetic can prime language and vice versa. Besides, previous research has found a potential link between linguistic cognition and other cognitive domains involving structured representations like musical cognition (Patel, 2003), mathematical cognition (Dehaene, Spelke, Pinel, Stanescu, & Tsivkin, 1999), and sequential processing (Lelekov, Franck, Dominey, & Georgieff, 2000). Based on the study of Scheepers et al. (2011), this paper investigates the structural priming by employing simple arithmetic equations. To prove whether arithmetic expressions produce similar structural priming effect on Chinese sentences, we selected one Chinese specific structure NP1+YOU+NP2+HEN+(AP), asking Chinese participants (adults and children, respectively) to finish two tasks, namely sentence completion task and sentence comprehension task. Altogether, this study covered both adults and children participants, each with the same two tasks. In this research, we mainly explored the following four questions: 1) Whether there is structural priming effect from arithmetic equation to Chinese specific sentence production; 2) Whether there is structural priming effect from arithmetic equation to Chinese specific sentence comprehension; 3) Whether children and adults show different structural priming effect in the two tasks; 4) Whether arithmetic and language share similar structural representations. Results of the sentence completion tasks showed that both adults and children tended to produce more low-attachment sentences than high-attachment sentences in baseline conditions; even the tendency was slightly more obvious for adults. However, the priming effect in adults was not as significant as in children in the sentence completion task. In other words, children generally showed a higher degree of structural priming effect than adults in equal conditions. On the contrary, results of the sentence comprehension tasks showed that both adults and children tended to produce more high-attachment sentences than low-attachment sentences in baseline conditions, also with greater tendency in adults. Similarly, in this task, children also outperformed adults for having been less affected by baseline tendency of the specific Chinese structure so as to show greater significant priming effect. All the above results showed that: 1) there was structural priming effect from arithmetic equation to Chinese specific sentence production; 2) there was structural priming effect from arithmetic equation to Chinese specific sentence comprehension; 3) children showed greater structural priming effect than adults in the two tasks; 4) arithmetic and language shared similar structural representations to some extent.

Key words

simple arithmetic equations / Chinese sentence / structural priming / structural representation

Cite this article

Download Citations
Structural Priming from Simple Arithmetic Equations to Specific Chinese Structure[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2015, 38(5): 1026-1031
PDF(462 KB)

Accesses

Citation

Detail

Sections
Recommended

/