Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
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.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2018-11-20
Abstract： Pronoun resolution can play a vital role in narrative comprehension. Understanding nature of pronoun resolution can help us to learn more about the cognitive processes underlying comprehension. Studies have shown that comprehension processes will be interrupted when a pronoun mismatches its prior context or the gender stereotype of its antecedent. This indicates that discourse context and world knowledge about gender stereotype can play an important role in pronoun resolution. Recently, researchers tried to combine these two factors together and to examine which factor is crucial to the pronoun resolution. The most controversial issue is that whether the discourse context could override the world knowledge which was told to be wrong by the passage, and exert earlier influence on the pronoun resolution. Therefore, the present study examined the effects of context and world knowledge as well as its time course on pronoun resolution with eye tracking measures. In the Experiment 1, participants were asked to read the discourse with a personal pronoun congruent or incongruent with the gender stereotype of its antecedent, an occupation name. The results revealed that reading times (including gaze, second reading time and total reading time) increased when the gender of the pronoun mismatched with the gender stereotype of its antecedent. In the Experiment 2, another personal pronoun indicating the gender of the antecedent would be inserted into the discourse as the prior context to update the readers’ gender stereotype of the occupation name. Therefore, readers would meet two identical personal pronouns while reading the passage. The first pronoun provided the updated gender information for the second pronoun. Again, the results of the first pronoun indicated that the gender stereotype of occupation could influence pronoun processing immediately. As for the second pronoun, the complicated results showed discourse context had an early influence on resolution of pronouns, but with the processing went on, the gender stereotype of occupation continued to influence integration. However, when the first pronoun was changed into an obvious gender description in Experiment 3, the discourse context was found not only to exert an earlier effect but the effect would be continued as the only factor to influence the pronoun resolution. The current results clearly suggest that both gender stereotype and discourse context can affect the comprehension of Chinese pronouns. However, when the discourse context updates the gender stereotype of the antecedents, the updating information can override the world knowledge information to exert an earlier effect on pronoun resolution. But whether the effects will be continued depend on the strength of the discourse context. These findings provide evidence for the interactive model of sentence comprehension.
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