Priming a perspective in Spanish monolingual children: The use of syntactic alternatives

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
PERLA B. GÁMEZ ◽  
PRIYA M. SHIMPI ◽  
HEIDI R. WATERFALL ◽  
JANELLEN HUTTENLOCHER

ABSTRACTWe used a syntactic priming paradigm to show priming effects for active and passive forms in monolingual Spanish-speaking four- and five-year-olds. In a baseline experiment, we examined children's use of the fue-passive form and found it was virtually non-existent in their speech, although they produced important elements of the form. Children used a more frequent Spanish passive form, the subjectless/se-passive. In a priming experiment, we presented children with drawings described using either active or fue-passive sentences. Children then described novel drawings. Priming was induced for active and passive forms; however, children did not produce the fue-passive provided for them. Instead, children used the subjectless/se-passive and what we term the function-passive, which like the fue-passive, emphasize the patient of the action. We argue that children's use of different passive forms suggests they are sensitive to experimenter's input as it relates to scene interpretation and to syntax.

Author(s):  
Demian Scherer ◽  
Dirk Wentura

Abstract. Recent theories assume a mutual facilitation in case of semantic overlap for concepts being activated simultaneously. We provide evidence for this claim using a semantic priming paradigm. To test for mutual facilitation of related concepts, a perceptual identification task was employed, presenting prime-target pairs briefly and masked, with an SOA of 0 ms (i.e., prime and target were presented concurrently, one above the other). Participants were instructed to identify the target. In Experiment 1, a cue defining the target was presented at stimulus onset, whereas in Experiment 2 the cue was not presented before the offset of stimuli. Accordingly, in Experiment 2, a post-cue task was merged with the perceptual identification task. We obtained significant semantic priming effects in both experiments. This result is compatible with the view that two concepts can both be activated in parallel and can mutually facilitate each other if they are related.


2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharina Casper ◽  
Klaus Rothermund ◽  
Dirk Wentura

Processes involving an automatic activation of stereotypes in different contexts were investigated using a priming paradigm with the lexical decision task. The names of social categories were combined with background pictures of specific situations to yield a compound prime comprising category and context information. Significant category priming effects for stereotypic attributes (e.g., Bavarians – beer) emerged for fitting contexts (e.g., in combination with a picture of a marquee) but not for nonfitting contexts (e.g., in combination with a picture of a shop). Findings indicate that social stereotypes are organized as specific mental schemas that are triggered by a combination of category and context information.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182199892
Author(s):  
Chiara Valeria Marinelli ◽  
Marika Iaia ◽  
Cristina Burani ◽  
Paola Angelelli

The study examines statistical learning in the spelling of Italian children with dyslexia and typically developing readers by studying their sensitivity to probabilistic cues in phoneme-grapheme mappings. In the first experiment children spelled to dictation regular words and words with unpredictable spelling that contained either a high- or a low-frequency (i.e., typical or atypical) sound-spelling mappings. Children with dyslexia were found to rely on probabilistic cues in writing stimuli with unpredictable spelling to a greater extent than typically developing children. The difficulties of children with dyslexia on words with unpredictable spelling were limited to those containing atypical mappings. In the second experiment children spelled new stimuli, that is, pseudowords, containing phonological segments with unpredictable mappings. The interaction between lexical knowledge and reliance on probabilistic cues was examined through a lexical priming paradigm in which pseudowords were primed by words containing related typical or atypical sound-to-spelling mappings. In spelling pseudowords, children with dyslexia showed sensitivity to probabilistic cues in the phoneme-to-grapheme mapping but lexical priming effects were also found, although to a smaller extent than in typically developing readers. The results suggest that children with dyslexia have a limited orthographic lexicon but are able to extract regularities from the orthographic system and rely on probabilistic cues in spelling words and pseudowords.


1992 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Schriefers ◽  
A. Friederici ◽  
P. Graetz

Using a repetition priming paradigm, the interrelations between morphologically related words in the mental lexicon were examined in two experiments. In contrast to most previous studies, in which morphologically complex words occur as primes and stems as targets, derivationally and inflectionally complex forms were fully crossed in prime–target pairs. Experiment 1 showed asymmetries in the pattern of priming effects between different inflectional forms of German adjectives. Such asymmetries are problematic for any theory that assumes that all members of an inflectional paradigm share one entry in the mental lexicon. Experiment 2 contrasted derivational and inflectional variants of the same stems used in Experiment 1. Once again, there were same clear asymmetries in the pattern of priming effects. The implications of these results for models of lexical organization of inflectional and derivational morphology are discussed.


2010 ◽  
pp. 113-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
João Rosa ◽  
Terezinha Nunes

Children in the early grades of primary school do not seem to have much awareness of morphemes. In this study, a priming paradigm was used to try to detect early signs of morphological representation of stems through a spelling task presented to Portuguese children (N= 396; age range 6 to 9 years). Primes shared the stem with the targets and contained well-articulated, stressed vowels; the stems of the target words contained non-stressed schwa vowels, which typically result in spelling difficulties. If priming proved effective, the well-articulated vowels in the prime should lead to improvement in the spelling of the schwa vowels in the targets. Primes were presented in two conditions: in only-oral or in oral-plus-written form. Effectiveness of priming was assessed by comparison with a no-priming condition. There was a significant interaction between priming effects and grade. No priming effects were detected in 6- and 7-year-old children; oral-plus-written priming produced higher rates of correct vowel spelling for 8- and 9-year-olds; only-oral priming was effective in improving the vowel spelling of 9-year-olds. Thus the older children used morphological information under priming conditions but there is no evidence to suggest that younger children did so.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Pyatigorskaya ◽  
Matteo Maran ◽  
Emiliano Zaccarella

Language comprehension proceeds at a very fast pace. It is argued that context influences the speed of language comprehension by providing informative cues for the correct processing of the incoming linguistic input. Priming studies investigating the role of context in language processing have shown that humans quickly recognise target words that share orthographic, morphological, or semantic information with their preceding primes. How syntactic information influences the processing of incoming words is however less known. Early syntactic priming studies reported faster recognition for noun and verb targets (e.g., apple or sing) following primes with which they form grammatical phrases or sentences (the apple, he sings). The studies however leave open a number of questions about the reported effect, including the degree of automaticity of syntactic priming, the facilitative versus inhibitory nature, and the specific mechanism underlying the priming effect—that is, the type of syntactic information primed on the target word. Here we employed a masked syntactic priming paradigm in four behavioural experiments in German language to test whether masked primes automatically facilitate the categorization of nouns and verbs presented as flashing visual words. Overall, we found robust syntactic priming effects with masked primes—thus suggesting high automaticity of the process—but only when verbs were morpho-syntactically marked (er kau-t; he chew-s). Furthermore, we found that, compared to baseline, primes slow down target categorisation when the relationship between prime and target is syntactically incorrect, rather than speeding it up when the prime-target relationship is syntactically correct. This argues in favour of an inhibitory nature of syntactic priming. Overall, the data indicate that humans automatically extract abstract syntactic features from word categories as flashing visual words, which has an impact on the speed of successful language processing during language comprehension.


2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-198
Author(s):  
Lucia Colombo ◽  
Giacomo Spinelli ◽  
Stephen J Lupker

There are now a number of reports in the literature that transposed letter (TL) priming effects emerge when two consonants are transposed (e.g., caniso-CASINO) but not when two vowels are transposed (e.g., cinaso-CASINO). In the present article, four masked priming lexical decision experiments, two in Italian and two in English, are reported in which TL priming effects involving the transposition of two adjacent consonants (e.g., atnenna-ANTENNA) were contrasted with those involving the transposition of a vowel and an adjacent consonant (e.g., anetnna-ANTENNA), a contrast not directly examined in the previous literature. In none of the experiments was there any indication that the priming effects were different sizes for the two types of transpositions, including Experiment 4 in which a sandwich priming paradigm was used. These results support the assumption of most orthographic coding models that the consonant–vowel status of the letters is not relevant to the nature of the orthographic code. The question of how to reconcile these results with other TL manipulations investigating vowel versus consonant transpositions is discussed.


2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Aguado ◽  
Teresa Dieguez-Risco ◽  
Constantino Méndez-Bértolo ◽  
Miguel A. Pozo ◽  
José A. Hinojosa

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fréédééric Marmel ◽  
Barbara Tillmann

THE MUSICAL PRIMING PARADIGM ALLOWS FOR INVESTIGATION of listeners' expectations based on their implicit knowledge of tonal stability. To date, priming data are limited to reports of facilitated processing for tonic over nontonic events. The special status of the tonic as a cognitive reference point brings into question the subtlety of listeners' tonal knowledge: Is the facilitated processing observed in priming studies limited to tonic events, or is tone processing influenced by subtler tonal contrasts? The present study investigated tonal priming for mediants (the third scale degree) over leading tones (the seventh scale degree) presented in melodic contexts. Experiment 1 used a timbre discrimination task and Experiment 2 an intonation task. Facilitated processing was observed for the more tonally stable mediants over the less stable leading tones, thus showing that priming effects are not limited to pairs of tonal degrees including the tonic. This finding emphasizes the subtlety of nonexpert listeners' tonal knowledge.


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