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Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
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Structural Priming and Frequency Effects Interact in Chinese Sentence Comprehension.
Hang Wei1, Yanping Dong2, Julie E Boland3
1School of Foreign Studies, Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an, China.
Frontiers in Psychology
|February 13, 2016
Summary
This study found that less frequent sentence structures are more influenced by structural priming during language comprehension. This interaction between priming and frequency impacts processing difficulty, especially in languages lacking morphological markings.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Language processing is sensitive to structural frequency and priming effects in European languages.
- The interaction between structural priming and frequency during online sentence comprehension remains unclear, particularly for languages without morphological markings.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the interplay between structural priming and frequency effects in Chinese sentence comprehension.
- To examine how the frequency of syntactic structures influences structural priming during real-time language processing.
Main Methods:
- A self-paced reading experiment was conducted using Chinese sentences with the ambiguous construction V NP1 de NP2.
- Sentences were disambiguated to either the more frequent NP structure or the less frequent VP structure.
- Participants were exposed to prime sentences (NP, VP, or neutral) before reading target sentences.
Main Results:
- Processing difficulty increased for the dispreferred VP structure when preceded by an NP prime compared to VP or neutral primes.
- No significant effect of prime type was observed when the ambiguity was resolved to the preferred NP structure.
- The less frequent syntactic structure (VP) was more susceptible to structural priming effects.
Conclusions:
- Structural priming in language comprehension is modulated by the baseline frequency of alternative structures.
- Less frequent structures are more affected by structural priming, supporting an error-based, implicit learning account.
- Findings contribute to understanding syntactic processing and learning in morphologically less-marked languages.
Keywords:
Mandarin Chinesebaseline frequencyinverse preference effectssentence comprehensionstructural primingMore Related Videos
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