Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA.
J Child Lang. 2012 Mar;39(2):258-83. doi: 10.1017/S0305000911000055. Epub 2011 Jun 27.
Priming methodology was previously used to investigate children's ability to represent abstract syntactic forms. Existing evidence indicates that following exposure to a particular syntactic structure (such as the passive voice), English-speaking children increase their production of that structure with new lexical items. In the present work, we utilize priming methodology to explore whether exposure to passive primes may increase children's production of sentences that have a different structure but share a similar purpose in discourse. We report three studies, two involving English- and Russian-speaking children, and a third involving Russian-speaking adults. Unlike English, Russian offers a variety of syntactic forms that emphasize the patient of a transitive action, thus fulfilling the discourse function of the passive. We found that English speakers increased the use of the particular syntactic form presented in the prime, whereas Russian speakers increased their production of several different syntactic forms used to emphasize the patient of the action.
启动方法学先前被用于研究儿童对抽象句法形式的表现能力。现有证据表明，在接触到特定的句法结构（如被动语态）之后，英语为母语的儿童会增加用新词汇来表达该结构的频率。在本工作中，我们利用启动方法学来探索接触被动启动是否可能会增加儿童生成具有不同结构但在语篇中具有相似功能的句子的频率。我们报告了三项研究，其中两项涉及英语和俄语为母语的儿童，还有一项涉及俄语为母语的成年人。与英语不同，俄语提供了多种句法形式，强调了及物动作的受事者，从而实现了被动语态的语篇功能。我们发现，英语使用者增加了对启动中呈现的特定句法形式的使用频率，而俄语使用者则增加了用于强调动作受事者的几种不同句法形式的使用频率。
