The impact of phonological similarity on syntactic priming: A comparison between young children and adults
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Date
2007Item status
Restricted AccessAuthor
Kerr, Aimee
Metadata
Abstract
It’s well established that adults have an abstract level of representation which
specifies syntactic information, independent of lexical, semantic or metrical content.
Strong evidence for this claim comes from adults’ demonstrations of syntactic
priming: the tendency to repeat the syntactic structure of previously experienced
language in otherwise unrelated sentences (e.g. the tendency to produce a description
like A red triangle, rather than A triangle that’s red, after hearing the phrase A yellow
circle). Little is known about whether phonological relations influence processes
involving these representations in either adults or children. Indeed, little is generally
known about the nature of young children’s syntactic knowledge. In the present study
syntactic priming’s potential ability to elucidate the form of noun phrase syntactic
representations in 3- and 4-year old children and adults, was exploited. A dialogue
priming task, disguised as the familiar “Snap” card game was employed, in which an
experimenter and a participant alternatively described cards depicting coloured
objects to one another. The experimenter’s prime descriptions had either an
Adjective-Noun (e.g. A yellow sock) or a Noun-Relative Clause structure (e.g. A sock
that’s yellow) and either featured the same noun as that depicted in the participants
card, or a rhyming noun (e.g. clock-sock). Child participants produced an identical
pattern of effects to adults; both displayed syntactic priming when the nouns in the
prime and target descriptions were the same and when they rhymed, with greater
priming being produced, and to a similar extent, when the noun was repeated.
Children only differed from adults in their susceptibility to syntactic priming,
showing reliably greater priming across all conditions. These results suggest that 3-
and 4-year olds have representations of noun phrase structure that are, as abstract and as affected by phonological similarity as adult’s syntactic representations, but benefit more from the facilitating effects of priming.