中心词和非中心词在句法启动的词汇增强效应中存在不同的机制

Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》

黄健 杨子瑜 洪丹萍 刘喜琴 王穗苹

Abstract： Lexical boost means that syntactic priming is enhanced by the lexical repetition between prime and target. It remains controversial whether the repetition of head words and that of non-head words induce similar boost effects. Two important theories in syntactic priming, the residual activation theory and the implicit learning theory, have quite different interpretations and predictions. The former holds that only the head word repetition can induce a lexical boost, while the latter holds that the non-head word repetition can induce a lexical boost of the same magnitude as the head word repetition does. There are conflicting experimental results on whether head and non-head word repetitions have similar lexical boost effects. We believe that one possible reason for the conflicting results in previous studies is that they lack sufficient power of the statistical test due to relatively small sample sizes. The present study explores the controversial issue by conducting three syntactic priming experiments of Mandarin double object (Experiments 1 and 3) and prepositional object (Experiment 2) structures, with a larger sample (115 participants each experiment) than that in previous research. To identify any possible difference in lexical boost effect, we manipulated the repetition of head constituents (i.e. verbs) and non-head constituents (i.e. argument nouns for agent, recipient, and theme) across prime and target. In all three experiments, we found that the lexical boost effect induced by the head word repetition was steady. The effect induced by the head word repetition was significantly stronger than that induced by the non-head word repetition. This indicates that the head constituent, rather than non-heads, plays a key role in the lexical boost. In addition, we found that the overlap of the direct object as a non-head induced a steady effect of lexical boost (although the effect is relatively weak). In Experiment 3, the subject repetition also induced a lexical boost effect. To some extent, these results seem to support the implicit learning theory since memory does play a certain role in lexical boost. The head word repetition and the non-head word repetition may reflect different cognitive mechanisms. We’d like to propose a new framework to interpret the lexical boost, which attempts to include both the residual activation theory and the implicit learning theory.

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