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Beyond syntactic priming: evidence for activation of alternative syntactic structures
Marina Vasilyeva1, Heidi Waterfall
1Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA. vasilyev@bc.edu
Journal of Child Language
|July 7, 2011
Summary
Children exposed to passive sentence structures adopt them. Russian speakers, however, use various structures to emphasize sentence subjects, demonstrating cross-linguistic differences in syntactic priming.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Priming methodology reveals children's capacity for abstract syntactic representation.
- Children exposed to specific syntactic structures, like the passive voice, increase their production of that structure with novel vocabulary.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if passive sentence priming influences children's production of sentences with similar discourse functions but different structures.
- To explore cross-linguistic variations in syntactic priming effects between English and Russian.
Main Methods:
- Utilized priming methodology with English- and Russian-speaking children and Russian-speaking adults.
- Exposed participants to passive sentence primes and analyzed subsequent sentence production.
Main Results:
- English speakers predominantly increased production of the primed syntactic structure.
- Russian speakers exhibited increased production across multiple syntactic forms serving a similar discourse function (patient emphasis).
Conclusions:
- Syntactic priming effects differ cross-linguistically, influenced by the grammatical resources available in a language.
- Russian's flexible syntax allows for broader structural adaptation to fulfill discourse functions compared to English.
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