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

摘要： 结构启动是指个体在产生或理解一个结构时，倾向于重复使用或仿照刚刚加工过的结构。与句法启动不同的是，结构启动除了以句子，也可以以其它抽象结构作为启动项。Scheepers et al. (2011) 首次以具有结构偏向性的抽象算式作为启动项，证实了高附着和低附着的简单算式对英语母语者产出高附着和低附着关系从句具有结构启动效应。在此基础上，本研究引用数学算式作为启动项，以汉语特定句型结构NP1+有+NP2+恨+(AP)为切入点，分别选取汉语成人和儿童受试，检验简单算式对汉语母语者产出或理解特定句型的结构启动效应。本研究发现：1）算式结构对汉语特定句型的产出具有结构启动效应。2）算式结构对汉语歧义句的解读具有结构启动效应。3）儿童和成人在产出和理解的启动实验中具有不同结构启动效应，且儿童的结构启动效应比成人的结构启动效应更强。4）算式结构和语言句式在认知上具有共享的结构表征。

关键词: 简单算术, 汉语句式, 结构启动, 结构表征